Michael Robinson works for the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based environmental group.

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In an effort to dampen controversy over construction of a wall along the United States border with Mexico, the Bush administration has officially decided not to develop a recovery plan for an endangered species that crosses the border — the American jaguar.

Recovery plans, written by teams of scientists and interested citizens, enumerate how many animals or plants and in what distribution would constitute recovery — the point at which a creature has moved away from the brink of extinction and is secure enough to be taken off the endangered species list. Recovery plans also specify actions to achieve recovery.

When jaguars were placed on the endangered species list in the United States in 1997, the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to develop a recovery plan or designate critical habitat for them, both required by the Endangered Species Act.

Its rationale for not protecting habitat? "Identification of this species' habitat preferences will be addressed through the recovery process," the service promised. Yet there has been no recovery process.

Instead, the interagency Jaguar Conservation Team, which in 1997 pledged to "coordinate protection of jaguar habitat," has not opposed construction of the border wall, much less addressed the accelerating loss of jaguar habitat due to urban sprawl, livestock grazing, strip mining and other developments.

The Fish and Wildlife Service says that a recovery plan would do no good because "the United States supports a small fraction of the individuals and available habitat of the jaguar" and recovery "must be focused on its core range outside of the United States."

If having few individuals in the U.S. disqualifies an endangered species from a recovery plan, gray wolves would never have been reintroduced and begun their recovery. Four individual jaguars have been photographed in Arizona and New Mexico since 1996. This number exceeds the number of wolves known in the northern Rocky Mountains or the Southwest when recovery plans were developed for them.

What about the jaguar's available habitat? European settlers found jaguars living from California to the Carolinas. But U.S. jaguar habitat has been examined only in Arizona and New Mexico, where three studies each identified millions of acres of potential habitat.

Are jaguars so secure outside the United States to merit writing them off domestically? The Fish and Wildlife Service admits that conservation plans outside the U.S. have "fallen short in stemming the decline of the jaguar."

Even if jaguars elsewhere were not declining, the U.S. would remain important to them. The American Society of Mammalogists (scientists who study mammals) states: "Habitats for jaguars in the United States, including Arizona and New Mexico, are vital to the long-term resilience and survival of the species, especially in response to ongoing climate change."

The mammalogists also state that "ecosystems in the United States in which jaguars formerly occurred are not intact without the sustained presence of jaguars."

There is no need to choose between recovery at home and abroad. The Fish and Wildlife Service has worked with foreign nations to develop international recovery plans for the Mexican gray wolf (1982) and the whooping crane (2007), among others creatures.

The Center for Biological Diversity has filed suit to ensure development of a jaguar recovery plan. The outcome of that suit may play a significant role in the decision on whether to keep walling off the United States from wildlife whose wanderings predate any border.