The Magazine of The Sierra Club
Alejandro Prieto’s Jaguar Story Celebrates Mexico’s Big Cats
The photographer hopes art will spur conservation
Photos and captions by Alejandro Prieto
Jaguars are competent climbers and will scale trees. They often use their vantage point among the branches to pounce on unsuspecting prey below. Jaguars are solitary animals, with males defending a large range and only coming together with females to mate. Breeding occurs throughout the year, and females have up to four cubs, which disperse after two years.
Prieto set a camera trap on the top of a scratched tree at Sierra de Vallejo, Nayarit. Jaguars mark trees to alert others of their presence in the area. The cats are territorial, and their range can be more than 50 square miles wide; a male aggressively protects his home range and resident females from other males. Destruction and fragmentation of their habitat are their biggest threats—500,000 hectares of forests and jungles are lost every year in Mexico.
Jaguars are extremely adaptable to any environment and make their home in a wide variety of habitats, including rainforests, mangroves, deserts, swamps, and mountains like Sierra de Vallejo in Nayarit; here, a wild jaguar captured by a camera trap is walking along the cliffs. Shy and elusive animals, jaguars often use caves located inside inaccessible places to hide and give birth to their cubs.
A jaguar wanders by a camera trap.
Aerial view of the mangroves at Marismas Nacionales, Nayarit—prime jaguar habitat in western Mexico.
The Jaguar (Panthera onca) is the largest cat in the Americas and the third-largest in the world (after the lion and the tiger). Jaguars can be distinguished from other big cats by the shape of their spots, which resemble roses and as such are known as rosettes. They are rarely seen in the wild, moving around mostly at night. Here, a wild jaguar is walking a trail in Chiapas.
A male jaguar temporarily captured at Sierra del Abra-Tanchipa in San Luis Potosi. It was the first captured for a conservation project new to this part of Mexico.
The jaguar was fitted with a GPS collar in order to track its movements; this information will let scientists know if the Sierra Madre Oriental can function as a biological corridor.
Aerial view of the parallel bars at Marismas Nacionales in Nayarit. This is the largest coastal ecosystem of mangroves in the Mexican Pacific. It involves a complex system of lagoons, estuaries, and other environments that shelter more than 300 species of birds, 111 species of fish, 33 species of reptiles, and 29 species of mammals, including the jaguar.
More than 1,000 people dressed like jaguars participate in a party called La Tigrada in Chilapa de Álvarez, Guerrero—probably the most important celebration dedicated to any animal in this country. They invoke Tepeyollotl, the jaguar god in the Aztec mythology, and ask for longer periods of rain and abundant crops. Their masks are made of wood, real hair, and the teeth of wild pigs.
Jaguars are some of the most elusive creatures in the Americas, which is why it took photographer Alejandro Prieto several months to capture his first photo of a wild one.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Prieto has been photographing wildlife such as sea lions, axolotls, and flamingos for 15 years. In 2018, he embarked on a year-long project to document jaguars and their cultural significance in southern Mexico. The big cats are listed as near endangered on the IUCN Red List, largely as a result of habitat loss. Through Jaguar Story, Prieto uses photography to illustrate the beauty and ecological importance of jaguars and hopefully spur conservation efforts.
For nearly a year, Prieto roamed mangroves, mountainous forests, jungles, and deserts from coastal Nayarit to the southernmost regions of Chiapas and Campeche, setting up 30 homemade camera traps in all. Arranging a digital camera trap, he says, is like setting up a mini studio: Every part of the system needs to work properly.
“I spent a lot of time looking for tracks or any other proof of the presence of these animals,” Prieto says. “Jaguars walk over trails most of the time so most cameras were set on trails. One camera I set over the top of a tree because of evidence that they marked their territory there.”
Along the way, Prieto asked villagers—many of them elderly—if they had ever seen a jaguar. They replied that they had seen their tracks, the marks of their claws on tree trunks, and had even heard them, but had never seen them. Nevertheless, jaguars are an integral part of Mexican mythology. As part of the project, Prieto photographed La Tigrada, a festival honoring jaguars, which is celebrated every August in the town of Chilapa de Álvarez in Guerrero. He also chronicled the operations of Alianza Jaguar AC, a nonprofit organization that collaborates with rural and Indigenous groups in Nayarit, Mexico, to promote jaguar conservation and sustainable development.
“My job is to show the beauty of nature, but more importantly, to show what is happening out there,” Prieto said. “Unfortunately, not everything is going in the right direction, but hopefully these images will cause a change.”