The border wall snaking along the US-Mexican border was built to keep migrants out -- but conservationists say the towering metal barrier also stops wildlife from moving between natural habitats.

Alarmed by the impact on animals including jaguars, bears and mountain lions, activists from the United States and Mexico have joined forces to try to protect the biodiversity corridor.

"This part of the border is one of the most interesting places in North America," said Valer Clark, founder of the transfrontier wildlife organization Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO).

Bears, mountain lions, deer, bighorn sheep and coatimundis are among the animals roaming the arid lands of southern Arizona and the northern Mexican state of Sonora, she told AFP.

But camera trap photos and the conservationists' own observations have revealed deer, mountain lions and black bears pacing along the border wall, confused and unable to access their former ranges, according to the group.

One family of boars spent five hours trying to get past the wall in search of water, said Jose Manuel Perez, CLO's conservation director.

Border lighting meanwhile deters nocturnal animals and can cause migratory birds that navigate by moonlight or starlight to lose their way, environmentalists warned.

The wall was first erected by the United States in 1994 and underwent major reinforcements during Donald Trump's 2017-2021 presidency.

The barrier, which stretches across almost all of Arizona's southern edge, "greatly affects" the migration of animals, Perez said.

CLO is calling for the removal or modification of the parts of the border wall that cause the most harm to wildlife, and for the restoration of all cross-border rivers.

It is more than 40 years since Clark moved to a cattle ranch in southwestern Arizona, where the New Yorker said she fell in love with the wide open spaces.

Back then it was a totally different place, where people would cross the border easily to visit relatives, she recalled.

The region may look barren, but in fact "it's full of important wildlife and diversity," said Eamon Harrity, wildlife project manager at the Sky Island Alliance, another conservation group active in the area.

"The development of a large human barrier has repercussions," he said.

Tiger blamed for 13 deaths caught in India
New Delhi (AFP) Oct 13, 2022 - Indian wildlife authorities on Thursday caught a tiger blamed for killing 13 people over 10 months, an official said.

Named "Conflict Tiger", or "CT-1", the five-year-old male was tranquilised and caught nearly a week after officials declared it a threat to humans and authorised its capture.

The big cat has been blamed for killing 13 people in remote, forested parts of the western state of Maharashtra since last December, including two in one day.

Its most recent killing was last month.

"We have been trailing the tiger for a while and it was finally captured inside the forest," wildlife official Kishor Mankar told AFP.

Mankar said all the victims were attacked inside the forest area, where some of them lived or had entered to collect firewood.

The tiger has been moved to the nearby Nagpur region and is being monitored by vets before a decision is taken about its future, he said.

It will either be released or remain in captivity.

CT-1 is was far from being India's only troublesome tiger.

On Saturday police shot dead another tiger, which had killed nine people in the eastern state of Bihar, in a major operation involving 200 people including trackers on elephants.

And students at a university in the central state of Madhya Pradesh have been told to stay indoors after dark, because of a tiger on the prowl around campus.

There has been an increase in man-animal conflict in parts of India, which conservationists blame on the rapid expansion of human settlements around forests and key wildlife corridors for animals such as elephants and tigers.

Nearly 100 people were killed in tiger attacks between 2019 and 2021 in India, according to government figures.

More than 200 tigers were killed by poachers or electrocution between 2012 and 2018, the data showed.

India is home to around 70 percent of the world's wild tigers, with a population estimated at 2,967 in 2018.

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Wildlife populations plunge 69% since 1970: WWF
Paris (AFP) Oct 12, 2022
Wild populations of monitored animal species have plummeted nearly 70 percent in the last 50 years, according to a landmark assessment released Thursday that highlights "devastating" losses to nature due to human activity. Featuring data from 32,000 populations of more than 5,000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, the WWF Living Planet Index shows accelerating falls across the globe. In biodiversity-rich regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean, the figure for anima ... read more