Heart of the Jaguar
The Extraordinary Conservation Effort to Save the Americas' Legendary Cat
by James Campbell
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Pub Date Nov 04 2025 | Archive Date Oct 31 2025
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Description
A fascinating story of the movement to protect the jaguar, and the man who devoted his life to saving the species
Once indigenous to North America, the jaguar is one of the wildest creatures left on the planet, a resilient and efficient predator, with a natural habitat that extends throughout Mexico and Central and South America. But today, one million years after it appeared in the New World, the jaguar is struggling to survive. It has disappeared entirely from Uruguay and El Salvador, and is critically endangered across much of its range.
Heart of the Jaguar tells the story of the extraordinary undertaking to save the jaguar, as well as the impassioned conservationist who dedicated his life to the species. James Campbell tracks the legacy of Alan Rabinowitz, a complex personality and a formidable scientist whom Time magazine called “the Indiana Jones of wildlife protection.” Rabinowitz first studied jaguars in the jungles of Belize and the Brazilian Pantanal in the 1980s, and later led the charge for the Jaguar Corridor Initiative, making it his dying mission to protect the big cat’s historic habitat.
Campbell journeys across two continents in search of the species’ past, present, and future, taking readers from the Bering Land Bridge to pre-Columbian jungle temples and modern-day jaguar preserves. Despite the thriving trade in jaguar parts and the ravages of industrial agriculture and climate change, Campbell finds sources of hope: wildlife biologists, Indigenous organizers, ranchers, and park administrators who carry on Rabinowitz’s legacy. Compelling and clear-eyed, Heart of the Jaguar celebrates these protectors, who continue to make enormous personal sacrifices to ensure that jaguars, the most charismatic of all the big cats, always have a home on this planet.
About the Author: James Campbell is the author of The Final Frontiersman, Braving It, and The Ghost Mountain Boys. He has written for Outside magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. He lives in Wisconsin.
Advance Praise
"The phrase charismatic megafauna gets tossed around too often, but when it comes to the jaguar—the greatest and most mesmerizing cat in all the Americas—the term is supremely justified. James Campbell has gamely ventured far and wide, enduring adversities matched only by his deep passion for his subject. Readers will love this wild story of a talismanic species that, despite an ever-encroaching modern world, has always found the audacity to survive." -Hampton Sides, New York Times best-selling author of The Wide Wide Sea
"In this deeply researched, courageously reported book, James Campbell journeys from tropical rainforests to southwestern deserts in the footsteps of a legendary cat. Heart of the Jaguar is an enthralling homage to one of the Western Hemisphere's most storied, elusive carnivores—and the fearless people committed to preserving wildness on an ever-shrinking planet." -Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings and Eager
"An important and engaging chronicle of a magnificent, charismatic species, Heart of the Jaguar gives us a glimpse into the rarified world of big cat conservation and its colorful champions who, possessed by the spirit of the wild, venture right up to the line of both sanity and death in their efforts to protect a creature of almost mythical power." -Tucker Malarkey, author of Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon
"In a journalistic tour de force, James Campbell goes on the trail of the jaguar and introduces us to the remarkable animal biologists trying to save these big cats from extinction. Through Campbell’s eye and spellbinding prose we experience the elusive big cat’s stunning habitat, its beauty, might, and intelligence, and its mesmerizing aura. And most crucially, Campbell convinces that the difficult task of saving the jaguar is a must. Heart of the Jaguar is a worthy adventure not to be missed." -Dean King, author of Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite and Sufferings in Africa
"Both inspiring and gripping, James Campbell’s Heart of the Jaguar artfully weaves together the life of famed jaguar researcher Alan Rabinowitz, a passionate, complex man, with the story of the jaguar itself—mysterious, beautiful, majestic, and, of course, threatened. To hike into jaguar habitat in various countries and on different continents with Campbell is to experience not just adventure, sorrow, and hope, but something so many of us crave and miss these days: the thrill of raw wildness." -David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains and Return of the Osprey
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393867619 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 336 |
