Abstract
I was on an overgrown dirt track far back in the Cockscomb Basin of Belize, a former access road cut when the timber company operating there had been on its last legs. One more rainy season and the road would be impassable, I thought as I crept along in the truck, listening to the static of my radio receiver that monitored the collars of my jaguars. I was after the radio signal of my newest jaguar, a young 36-kilogram (79-pound) male I had recently captured in this area and named Xamen Ek, after the Mayan god of the North Star, a benevolent deity. It was 1984, and at age 30 with my relatively new PhD credentials I was conducting the first ecological study of its kind on jaguars in rain forest habitat as a field scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Every day brought new adventures and challenges. And every day I gained more insight into the mysteries of how the Western Hemisphere’s largest and least-known big cat lived.
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© 2014 Alan Rabinowitz
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Rabinowitz, A. (2014). The First People of the Jaguar. In: An Indomitable Beast. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-227-3_3
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