November is Jaguar month, and the 29th is International Jaguar Day. To celebrate the occasion properly, Mexico’s Alianza Jaguar is inaugurating a photo exhibit the night before, at the Tierra Tropical Beach Club in the town of San Francisco—popularly known as San Pancho—in Nayarit.
The exhibit is unusual in that all the pictures that will be on display were submitted by ranchers and farmers living in the remote hills and dales of the newly constituted Sierra de Vallejo-Río Ameca Biosphere Reserve.
“What puts this show into a category of its own is that all the photos were taken by camera traps,” says Erik Saracho, director of the Alianza Jaguar.
From jaguars to turtles
The camera-trap program, sponsored by the RIU Hotel in Nuevo Nayarit, encourages people in rural areas to capture images not only of jaguars, pumas and ocelots, but also of other wild animals and birds on their property, such as hawks, vultures, foxes, peccaries, deer and turtles.
This project began as a scientific initiative, but has become a deeply personal experience for many participants, who have learned to embrace the cats as beings living among them.
They may refer to one as “el jaguar del paso de los bueyes” (the jaguar of the ox pass) and another as “el puma del agua zarca” (the puma of the light-blue water). These names indicate respect for creatures that were previously hated as predators.
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