Even for a very frequent flier, this is a singular first.
It’s October, and I’m zipping over northern Argentina in a Cessna Grand Caravan — the kind of workhorse airplane I used to skydive out of a lifetime ago. The plan is to stay inside, but this flight still thrills because the passenger list includes a wild jaguar.
And it has just woken up.
The 74-year-old woman sitting next to me shows concern — not for our safety — but that of the apex predator in the box right behind our seats.
We started the journey a few hours before at a jaguar reintroduction center in the wetlands of Iberá National Park. After the vet sedated the cat with a dart and prepared to stuff her ears with cotton to muffle the propeller noise, the once-CEO of Patagonia Kristine Tompkins looked on with mothering concern.
“It must have been exhilarating, the first few times you did this,” I said in a hush.
“It’s exhilarating still,” she replied, eyes locked on the jaguar. “But so many things can go wrong. I just worry about how it’s all going to go. What’s the stress on the animal? The stress on the team?”
On the plane, I peek at the groggy cat through an air hole in the box and then out the Caravan window at the town of Juan José Castelli below — our landing spot. It strikes me how the folks below would never imagine a wild jaguar in the sky, because such a translocation has never been tried. But if the woman on the plane has her way, this is just the beginning; Chaco Province will be part of the most ambitious conservation project on Earth.
Tompkins wants to rewild the Americas. She wants pampas deer, giant anteaters, river otters and pumas to return to healthy numbers across South America. And she dreams of a day when jaguars — the biggest cats on the continent — can once again roam from Argentina to Texas.
“I mean, there’s so many projects that can and should be taken on immediately to bring breeding populations of jaguars back to the United States,” she says emphatically. “That’s a no brainer.”
“I can imagine the headlines,” I reply, eyebrows raised. “What about the fear? The predator stigma?”
“Somebody needs to put (the idea) out there,” she shrugs. “With a plan that addresses the fears with a tremendous amount of social interaction and education. But I haven’t seen an example where a species has been reintroduced and has been made extinct again by neighbors. I just haven’t seen it.”
A love story for the ages
If anyone can make such an audacious claim, it’s the woman who helped create or expand 15 national parks in South America, thanks to a life of rugged adventure, and a romance for the ages.
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins grew up on a California ranch and was always drawn to outdoor types, so she fell into her first job with rock climber Yvon Chouinard and his new outdoor equipment company. They called it Patagonia.
By 28, she was CEO, and at 43 she found the love of her life in the wilds of southern Chile. One of Chouinard’s best friends — North Face and Esprit founder Doug Tompkins — made such an impression that after one off-the-grid trip together, she retired, packed two bags and moved into his cabin.
They had no phones or internet, but they had each other, Doug’s plane (a tough, single-engine Husky) and a burning desire to protect the Patagonian wilderness from the ravages of cattle ranches and soy plantations. Doug would cash in stock, sell his legendary art collection and buy millions of acres in Chile and Argentina with the grand plan of giving it all away as national parks.
But locals were naturally suspicious, and conspiracy theories began to fly. Some believed they were going to melt the glaciers and sell the water to China or create a shelter for Jewish people to escape World War III.
“The first five years were very rough,” Kris recalls. “Death threats and a lot of upheaval for team members.” She says their phones were tapped and Chilean military planes would even buzz the Tompkins’ cabin, but they preserved until the politics changed and they could prove their intent with the opening of Pumalin National Park.
“There were trails and campgrounds and a restaurant and a little hotel. And the infrastructure was beautiful and respectful, and everything was for free. You didn’t have to pay to camp,” she says. “And that really was a tectonic shift because people could see that while we may be crazy, we were doing what we were said.”
But in the winter of 2015, just as public sentiment was swinging their way, Doug fell out of a kayak on a massive South American lake and died of hypothermia. Kris was left to complete their vision, with their team, but without her soulmate.
“When he died, he took the best of me with him, and I kept the best of him with me,” she told me back in 2016, in the first TV interview after his death. “I carry him around with me in the pocket of my heart. But he left me with so much.”
A giant step for Mini
Eight years later, we’re together again as the plane bounces down on a grass strip and the team from Rewilding Argentina, an organization that spun out of Tompkins Conservation, transfers the precious passenger onto the bed of a 4x4. Under a blazing sun, we set out on the dusty, bouncy four-hour drive to a place fittingly known as El Impenetrable.
With over 500 square miles of brambles and cacti, roseate spoonbills and howler monkeys, the forest is second only to the Amazon in continuous size in South America, but after generations of hunting and human encroachment, only a handful of jaguars remain. As the only members of the genus Panthera in the Americas, the biggest male jaguars can tip 350 pounds but the 120-pound female in the box is small enough to be named Mini.
“The names are all their chosen by schoolchildren,” Kris tells me.
“You know there’s this debate in science,” I reply. “That we shouldn’t anthropomorphize wild animals and give them names?”
“That’s baloney,” she shoots back. “Exactly what you would call her? ‘27?’ Really? Fabulous,” she says with deadpan sarcasm. “’You mean so much to us. We’re going to name you 27.’”
At the jaguar reintroduction center in Iberá National Park, where the big cats are bred, the teams from Rewilding Argentina isolate jaguar cubs from human contact from the moment they are born and they spend the first couple of years learning to hunt in huge enclosures. Mini was one of 28 successful jaguar releases into Iberá and now has the distinction of being the first one moved into an entirely new ecosystem in the Gran Chaco.
It’s almost dark by the time we reach her new, temporary home and there is an awed hush among the team as we watch her disappear into the forested five-acre pen. She’ll acclimate here for about eight months before she’s released into the wild. Within hours, the males in El Impenetrable show signs that they know she’s here. So for them — and for Kris and Rewilding Argentina — release day can’t come soon enough.
“Doug would be so proud,” I tell her, but she demurs with praise for the team and when pressed, offers the biggest lesson learned over her wild life.
“Live with no fear. Live with the real sense that you’ve got to get up every day and go for broke. You know, when Doug died, I lost all fear because the worst thing that could happen to me had happened. He’s been gone nine years now, but I feel that. Every day. Go for broke. You have nothing to be afraid of.”
This story has been updated to clarify details of Kris Tompkins’ personal life.
