In scouring the internet for news items, we stumbled across two indications of progress:
It appears that jaguars have been successfully reintroduced to Ibera Park, an Argentine wetland. 70 years after they went extinct in that area.
In a joint statement obtained by Zenger News on Thursday, Tompkins Conservation and Fundación Rewilding Argentina said: “Camera trap footage reveals the birth of the first jaguars (Panthera onca) in the wild for Rewilding Argentina in the 1.8-million-acre Ibera Park.
“Their parents were released last year: Jatobazinho, a rehabilitated wild jaguar from Brazil, and Arami, the first jaguar cub born in 2018 at the Jaguar Reintroduction Center in the wetlands.”
The full story from Newsweek, including video, is here.
Perhaps related, we also learned from Happy Eco News (isn’t that a great sounding website?) and Mongabay that bringing cheetahs back to southern Malawi has resulted in four species of endangered vultures returning as well:
Four species of critically endangered vulture have returned to a park in southern Malawi from which they disappeared more than 20 years ago, and their comeback is credited to the reintroduction of cheetahs, lions and the carcasses the cats left behind, conservationists say.
In 2017, seven cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) were reintroduced to Liwonde National Park under a project run by African Parks and the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), two conservation groups working in partnership with Malawi’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW).
Within days, and with the cheetahs still in their acclimatization pen or boma, the vultures showed up.
