Photo caption: "A jaguar dubbed 'the Boss' in Tucson, Arizona. Rare sightings of the mammals in the Whetstone and Huachuca mountains have raised hopes of their return to the US."
"I was thrilled and shocked": images raise hopes of return of wild jaguars to the US | The Guardian
A series of sightings suggests the big cats are, against the odds, growing in numbers in New Mexico and Arizona. But Trump’s border wall could yet halt their progress
In the US and Canada, Parks people will constantly say shit like "oh [uncommon animals] don't exist in [region.] They've been regionally extinct for 200 years and all those pictures people are getting on doorbell cams and stuff are just ones that decided for no reason to walk 1000 miles away from their range in search of significantly less prey than exists where they normally live."
Sure bro. Yeah, a fucking lion just decided to hop a flight from Montana to the NYC metro area in search of pizza pie. Yeah bro that manatee decided to come to Delaware to file his corporate taxes. Great-tailed grackles simply come to Canada in search of ketchup chips. These are all totally just vagrant males deciding to pick up and go on a real quick transcontinental journey on a lark.
I think Fish and Wildlife/MNR/etc. are deeply naive at best and actively deceiving people at worst. Shit needs a massive overhaul and a huge reprioritisation in favour of rewilding is needed desperately. There isn't a square inch of the americas from Alaska to Argentina that isn't supposed to be packed full of cougars and wolves and we gotta get fixing this shit.
I'll mostly agree with you. Mostly, because those flamingos in Wisconsin recently really were a fluke.
Oh yeah, birds definitely are a lot more likely to end up in weird places due to large weather events and the like. I think those flamingoes got pushed around by a hurricane, right? Migration fallout events have also caused incredible amounts of birds to get stuck in certain "flyover" areas, sometimes even outside of their migratory range.
Climate change is only going to make these events more common for all types of animals, and we need to get out of the sort of 1930s mindsets of hard range borders and the use of sport hunting for population management. People are going to have to get used to the concept of not being able to just use any land they want for whatever they want all the time, and they'll have to get used to having legal and safety consequences for their actions.