SAHUARIPA, Mexico — Where saguaro cacti give way to palm trees, some 130 miles south of the U.S. border, a small ranching town is quietly obsessed with jaguars (Panthera onca). Jaguar murals adorn walls, and local ranchers, usually demure and mustachioed, treasure their printouts of big cats caught on camera traps. Sahuaripa is the nearest town to the Northern Jaguar Reserve, 22,600 hectares (56,000 acres) of protected, privately owned land, where trail cameras have captured more than a dozen jaguars padding through the very northernmost reach of their range at any one time. The reserve itself is still several hours’ cross-country drive away from Sahuaripa, part of what struck conservation manager Miguel Gómez Ramírez when he arrived there 16 years ago. “From the start, this seemed like nowhere I had been before, especially because of how far away the reserve is, how difficult it is to get there — the road, the time.” The Northern Jaguar Reserve now sits close to a recently declared lithium mining zone. Image courtesy of the Northern Jaguar Reserve. Recently, however, the reserve has captured a different type of attention. On a trip in April 2024, Gómez Ramírez pulls to the side of a dirt track halfway between Sahuaripa and the first campground and points to a dead palm trunk surrounded by slightly sulfurous mounds of earth. “Everything yellow is lithium,” mixed with clay, he says. Just 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the edge of the jaguar reserve, this deposit is now part of the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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