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SONORA, Mexico — This landscape didn’t seem like a place to find jaguars, the world’s most famous jungle cat.

The ground was parched and rocky and mostly brown, other than the occasional cactus or palm tree. It was so hot and dry that even some of the prickly nopales were wilting.

Yet there it was — in the playback screen of a motion-sensing camera, strapped to an oak tree near a dry stream bed. Less than a week earlier, a large jaguar had walked exactly where I was now standing. Even from the small camera display, the cat looked imposing, with its oversized paws and a wide, skull-crushing jaw.

It was a blistering afternoon in April, and I was in the Northern Jaguar Reserve, a protected area in Sonora about 125 miles south of the US border in Arizona. The reserve and the region around it are home to the world’s northernmost population of jaguars, the largest cats in the Western Hemisphere, as well as three other species of wild felines: ocelots, bobcats, and mountain lions, or pumas.

The cat on the screen was named El Guapo. He’s the largest of five or six resident jaguars in the reserve and has likely fathered a handful of kittens, Miguel Gómez Ramírez, the reserve manager, told me.

El Guapo has a bold personality: While some of the park’s jaguars get spooked by the flash or sound of motion cameras scattered through the reserve, jumping in the air like surprised house cats, El Guapo doesn’t seem to care. It’s as if he knows he’s at the top of the food chain.

While jaguars are often associated with the tropics, they once ranged as far north as Southern California, the Grand Canyon, and possibly even Louisiana. The US had jaguars!

Then they were gone.

By the mid-1900s, ranchers and hunters had exterminated these felines, largely because they were seen — like many other wild predators — as a threat to cattle. Jaguars do occasionally kill cows, though few cases of livestock predation in the US have actually been verified.

Over the last few decades, several male jaguars have been spotted in their historic territory in the American Southwest — most recently, in December 2023. The extraordinary sightings give environmental advocates hope that jaguars could one day return to the US, fixing a broken food chain and recovering an important missing piece of Indigenous culture in the southern borderlands.

Those cats all came from northern Mexico. They came from the region where I was now standing, slipping through some of the last remaining gaps in the border wall.

That means any chance that jaguars now have of returning to the US depends on maintaining openings in the wall — and on an ample reserve of cats in northern Mexico. Jaguars can only reestablish in their northern range if they’re sufficiently abundant in Mexico, where they’re endangered. And like in the US, ranchers in Sonora have a long history of killing felines for their perceived, and occasionally real, threat to cattle.

While the Northern Jaguar Reserve helps protect wild cats in Sonora, what had ultimately brought me to Mexico was a project to conserve jaguars that extends far beyond the park’s boundary.

For many years, a small group of scientists and advocates have been working to cast Sonora’s jaguars in a different light — to turn them from beef-hungry villains to important features of the ecosystem that can bring ranchers financial reward. Those efforts appear to be paying off: The population of jaguars in the reserve and the ranching region around it is stable, if not growing, offering hope that people can live harmoniously with the predators they once loathed.

The Northern Jaguar Reserve is, without exaggerating, in the middle of nowhere.

I traveled there last month with Roberto Wolf, a veterinarian who leads the Northern Jaguar Project (NJP), an American nonprofit that oversees the refuge. After crossing the border south of Tucson, we drove another four hours or so to a charming ranch town called Sahuaripa, where the narrow streets were lined with brightly colored homes and full of stray dogs.

From there it was another few hours on to the reserve, largely on rugged dirt roads. (I felt like we were in one of those car commercials for all-terrain vehicles that are only useful in this exact scenario.)

Some time after entering the reserve we stopped by a log on the side of the road. It was covered in scratch marks, like the arm of a couch in a home filled with cats. That was the work of a mountain lion marking its territory, said Gómez, who met us in the park. He pointed out a motion camera nearby that had previously captured the behavior.

Right before arriving at our campsite, a skunk ran across the front of the car, did a handstand, and then disappeared into the scrub.

The next morning, which was cloudless and crisp, we hiked to a place called La Hielería — the spot where the trail cam had recently spotted El........

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