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Defenders Magazine
Wild Cat Blues
Threatened by habitat loss and roads, ocelots hang on by a paw in south Texas.
Mindful of the tick-infested mesquite with its needle-sharp thorns, a well-padded Linda Laack creeps stealthily along on her belly. Mosquitoes hum about her head in the bright south Texas sun, but she focuses only on the bleep coming from the radio collar. After nearly a half-mile, she’s drawing close. That’s when the pitch changes, indicating the mother cat is on to her and moving away. The foot-high feline won’t go far, nor will it attack—hardwired to trust that the thick understory won’t let predators find the offspring she’s stashed. As the radio collar’s signal fades, all Laack can do is hope she catches the glint of a kitten’s eyes as she gropes her way through the spiny scrub.
She does—and that’s how the biologist discovers the first documented ocelot den in the United States back in 1985. “It was a female kitten, about two or three weeks old,” says Laack, who—after 20 years of ocelot work in Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge about 20 miles from the Mexican border—is now a biologist for Environmental Defense. “They are very docile at that age. A feral housecat would’ve at least tried to tear me up.”
Getting a glimpse of wild ocelots in a natural setting is a rare event—even for the biologists who track them. That’s partly because the 15- to 30-pound cats (slightly smaller than a bobcat) are shy, secretive and active only at night, but mostly it’s because so few are left.
Once hunted for their dappled, velvety fur and snatched up for the pet trade, the 80 or so furtive felines that manage to hang on in the United States—in a sunny little pocket along the Gulf Coast of Texas—are today victims of habitat loss and fragmentation, genetic isolation and road mortality. Or, more specifically: mile upon mile of factory-farmed fields, mega shopping malls and a dizzying zigzag of roads the cats can’t safely cross. Even here, on 46,000 acres of federally protected land, the cats—protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1982—cannot find safe haven. Since 1983, cars traveling on roads through the refuge and its surroundings have killed at least 26 ocelots, making death on the asphalt the cats’ leading cause of mortality. In the face of so many hurdles, the cat’s future hinges entirely on the efforts of a handful of people who are trying to ensure it doesn’t go the way of the jaguar (missing from the Lower Rio Grande Valley since the early 1950s) and the jaguarundi (last seen in 1986).
“The ocelot is in dire straights,” says Jody Mays, the federal biologist at Laguna Atascosa who took the torch from Laack in 2005. “Before anyone realized how bad it was, it was already really bad off. We have the only U.S. population on federally protected land, so it’s really dependent on us to keep it from sliding into extinction.”
To do so, Mays and a few volunteers set traps when the weather permits, trying to catch and put radio collars on as many of the refuge’s ocelots as they can. Mays also takes blood samples, gives the cats rabies shots and checks their overall health. “With so few left in the United States, we’re trying to identify emerging problems, collect information, find out what happens to them and then figure out what we can do to help them,” she says. Last season, Mays managed to catch six cats, but this year she’s had no such luck. Making early morning rounds to the 13 cages volunteers set yesterday, she’s hoping that today her dry spell will end.
The first trap she checks stands empty. The hatch on the wire cage wedged tightly into the thornscrub gapes wide open, untouched. Approaching the second, she can see the trap’s been sprung—by a raccoon, curled into a tight ball inside the cage hiding an eye behind a paw. “They really make a mess of the cages,” says Mays, pointing to the dirt the raccoon dug up trying to claw its way both to the bait and out of the enclosure. Still, she can’t help but laugh when she sees the animal’s lumbering skedaddle—after a moment’s hesitation—when she opens the trap.
Of the refuge’s 30 or so cats, currently only five wear collars. Two collars are old and their batteries are ready to give out, making Mays all the more eager to catch at least one cat before the summer heat sets in and she can no longer use the traps. Higher temperatures make it too dangerous to keep a cat corralled for hours, and she doesn’t want to take any risks: A single death is dire for such a small population.
Of the cats that have been “worked up” in previous years, blood samples show that, like the rare Florida panthers with their crossed eyes and crooked tails, these cats are also becoming dangerously inbred.
Ocelots once ranged throughout most of Texas and into Arkansas, Louisiana and Arizona. But today there are only two breeding populations left in the United States—Laguna’s and about 10 on private land about 15 miles north. “The number 80 is optimistic,” says Mays. “It’s possible there’s a pocket population we don’t know about.” The next closest breeding population is 150 miles south in Mexico, where the cats are healthier and probably more numerous. “But genetic evidence proves that the two U.S. populations are isolated both from one another and from the Mexico population,” she says.
Making Highways Safer
Nearly 4 million miles of roads and 200 million vehicles keep Americans moving. But our mobility can stop wild animals dead in their tracks: More than a million animals are killed on U.S. highways every year. In fact, road kill is the No. 1 way that humans kill wildlife in the United States, and it’s pushing the ocelot and other species, including the Florida panther and the grizzly bear, closer to extinction. Defenders’ Habitat and Highways Campaign aims to make existing roads less dangerous to wildlife by modifying them with wildlife crossings and working with state agencies to incorporate wildlife conservation into transportation planning. For more information and to find out what you can do, please visit Defenders' Habitat and Highways Campaign.
A loss of genetic diversity makes populations more vulnerable to birth defects and disease. Telltale signs of inbreeding are apparent on the cats’ noses. Usually solid pink, those of the cats in the refuge sport black blotches.
To try to fix the problem, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with conservation groups and local landowners to create a corridor of habitat linking the Laguna cats with the smaller population of ocelots to the north. A new ocelot recovery plan is expected within a year and likely will recommend incentives that encourage private landowners to restore native plants to their property. This is particularly important in Texas, where at least 93 percent of the land is privately owned.
The federal government is also working to bridge Laguna with a recently acquired parcel of land about eight miles to the south. This land, the Bahia Grande Unit of Laguna refuge, contains about 6,000 acres of potential ocelot habitat. (Each cat needs 500 to 1,000 acres.) The goal is to create a corridor of protected habitat between the two wild lands within five years and—fingers crossed—bring in some “fresh ocelot genes” from Mexico. Skyrocketing property values are making the purchase of parcels in the corridor difficult, however, as land that sold for no more than $3,000 an acre 10 years ago now goes for as much as $300,000 in some spots. The region is turning into a mecca for seniors, attracted by balmy temperatures, a low cost of living and cross-border shopping. In their wake come big-box stores, condos, golf courses, parking lots and more roads.
These roads become even more troublesome for the cats when they come with four-foot-high Jersey barriers, placed to prevent head-on collisions with oncoming traffic. “With barely any space on either side of the wall, even if a cat manages to dodge traffic and leap the wall, the likelihood of it landing on the windshield of a car traveling in the other direction is close to certain,” says Ernesto Reyes, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.
If ocelots are relocated from Mexico to help improve the genetic health of the U.S. populations, the roads pose another dilemma. Given how territorial the cats are, these transplants might be more inclined to bolt from their new homes and get hit by cars. Females are more likely to stay put but they don’t reproduce until they are three or four years old and then have only one or two kittens a year—even less often under drought conditions. “Males could reinvigorate the gene pool quicker, but they are the ones most likely to bolt long distances and be at greater risk of getting killed while crossing roads,” says Mays. “With females, you’d probably have to bring in more, but then where do you put them?”
Less than 5 percent of the native thorn forest that the ocelots rely upon remains in south Texas today. What wasn’t plowed and turned into cropland for sorghum, citrus and cotton a century ago was cleared for cattle. And ocelots, unlike bobcats and coyotes, weren’t able to adapt to the wide-open spaces that resulted. “People ask me, how come bobcats are doing so well and ocelots aren’t,” says Mays. “It’s because we’ve created habitat favorable to bobcats, they are much more adaptable and they can tolerate human activities better.”
Biologists speculate that the five different species of cats—mountain lions, jaguarundi, ocelots, bobcats and jaguars—that evolved here together did so by finding their own niches to avoid having to compete with one another. Bobcats, for example, have basically the same diet as ocelots—birds, small mammals and rodents such as wood rats and cotton rats—but they live along forest edges. Ocelots hunt by creeping through the thorns, their irregular dark splotches on a tawny and beige coat blending in perfectly with the streaks and bars of dappled forest light. “It worked great for them until we eliminated the habitat,” says Mays.
To make matters worse, within the next year ocelots will face another hurdle when the Texas Department of Transportation begins widening a two-lane, pothole-lined road that runs for 12 miles—part of it through the refuge. Improvements to the road will shave 10 miles off a 43-mile journey from one of the local airports to South Padre Island, a vacation and convention hotspot complete with high-rise hotels.
“Should we really be putting spring-breakers ahead of a critically endangered species?” asks Trisha White, director of Defenders of Wildlife’s Habitat and Highways Campaign. “There are other avenues. You don’t have to send tourists through the refuge in the one and only place where ocelots still exist in the United States, especially when we know that road mortality is their No. 1 threat.”
But Reyes, who negotiated with the transportation department to lessen the road’s impact on wildlife, says, “We can’t just stop because it’s an endangered species. We have to work with the state and do the best we can to avoid or minimize impacts.” He also sees a bright side: The transportation department agreed to construct 11 wildlife crossings along the road. “Even in its deteriorated state, this road needs wildlife crossings built along it because it’s already causing a lot of ocelot mortality,” he says.
Whether the ocelots will use the culverts is another story. “Past efforts by the state to help ocelots cross the road have been unsuccessful,” says White. “The cats didn’t use the previous underpass and, in fact, a dead ocelot was found 100 yards away.” This time an environmental consulting firm will monitor the crossing for two years to see what works and what doesn’t. Reyes says they are prepared to make any necessary modifications.
White scoffs at the scheme. “How many more compromises are the cats expected to withstand?” she asks. “We’re not suggesting the world come to a stop, but I do think we should respect the needs of one of the rarest endangered species within the confines of a refuge.”
As the road plans move forward, back at the refuge hope still springs eternal. The next day, the two volunteers checking traps try to improve their odds of catching a cat by sprinkling ocelot-urine-soaked litter inside the cages. A week ago, the nearby town of Harlingen hosted the annual ocelot conservation festival. To raise local awareness for the cats, the Friends of Laguna Atascosa group flew in two ocelots from a zoo in Florida. Mays kept their litter in the hopes that the stench will lure a wild cat to the cages. When that runs out, they’ll substitute Calvin Klein’s Obsession. “Awhile ago someone at a zoo discovered some ocelots really have a thing for the perfume,” says Mays.
At the end of their rounds, the volunteers radio Mays the disappointing news: “No, ocelots today, not even a raccoon.”
Ever optimistic, Mays
believes this might be a good sign. “They’re not hungry enough to check out the
cages, so they must be getting food other ways,” she says. “That’s good news,
but it sure makes them hard to study.”
