Staff Voice: I told you she was pregnant!

Written by-Rachel, Field Staff Member

For many months now I have been telling anyone who will listen that one of our jaguars, a female called Eliana, is pregnant. She was caught on camera on two occasions with male jaguars at the end of August last year.  She then got progressively fatter over the following months, culminating in a video in November where she was so fat that the effort of eating a turtle was wearing her out and she had to lie down to rest. This was when I began obsessively telling people that she was pregnant, to which most people responded ‘No she’s just eaten too many turtles’.

It began to seem like they may have been right. She disappeared for several months, and I was somewhat crestfallen when the first few times we saw her this year, she was alone.

All this changed though with a recent camera set up on a fresh kill a few miles from base. I had been asked not to say who the jaguar was as we watched the videos so that other people could practice their identification skills. The screen was a little dark so I was struggling to make out the rosettes, so when a cub appeared on screen my first thought was that maybe it was Molly who we already know has a cub. But then she turned to the side and I got a good look. I started hopping up and down with excitement, I didn’t say the name but my apparent jubilation was enough to give it away. I ran around base shouting ‘It’s Eliana with a cub, I WAS RIGHT!’

The next day it got even better. As I settled down to look through all the videos properly and organise them, I found out that there was not one cub but two. There was only one clip with both of them in so we had missed it the day before. This led to more excited running around and shouting ‘There are two cubs!’

We have named them Tito and B’alam, and we are all hoping that we will be seeing much more of them as turtle season progresses.

Tito and B´alam captured together sharing a meal

Staff Voice: I told you she was pregnant!