Florida Panthers : Last of Big Cats in East Cling to Life

The path was muddy, and the tracks were fresh. A panther was in the brush.

She’s close, probably just east, one man said. His head bobbed toward a clump of palmettos. But the others weren’t sure. Panthers are so cautious. The cat had probably lit out when the truck door slammed.

So, they walked ahead, inspecting the ground for clues. Tracks went in all directions. Some were black bear, some bobcat, some panther. They found a dropping near a pine cone. “Go to it, Walt,” the man said.

Walt McCown, a biologist, broke it apart with his thumbs. A panther’s favorite food is deer. But the fur in this lump was marsh rabbit. “Bobcat left this,” McCown concluded, tossing the clue to the ground.

Paw Tracks Spotted

Then, just a few minutes later, they saw them, paw tracks too big for bobcat and too small for a grown panther. Here, there and there again. It looked like a young cat was walking beside her mom. A kitten, I’ll bet, McCown said.

“Hope itself,” Dave Maehr, the other man from the state game commission, agreed.

That casual find a few weeks ago was rare good news for biologists, who consider the Florida panther to be the most endangered large mammal in North America. Perhaps two dozen survive, and most of them are old and scrawny and loaded with hookworms.

For America, loss of this panther would mean the end of the many big cats that once roamed east of the Mississippi River. All the other eastern subspecies of panthers are considered extinct. The hardwood swamps near the Everglades are the final retreat.

For Florida, the shame of this looming extinction is worse. Here, the panther is short on space, starved for protein and in danger of being run down by cars.

It also is the state’s official animal.

‘Tough to Explain’

“It’d be kind of embarrassing to lose the state animal, and a pretty tough thing to explain to the schoolchildren,” said Maehr, the wildlife biologist in charge of a project to save the panther.

So finding paw tracks that might be a kitten’s was exciting. Maehr and McCown marked the best print with a stick. Then they made a plaster cast of it and compared it with an old cast from a different kitten.

“Matched right up,” Maehr said.

Panthers can grow long as a man and weigh 130 pounds. Their hide is brown, not black as the legends declare. They are relentless vagabonds, shy and skittish, loners except when mating. They may prowl 20 miles in a day, pausing only after a kill.

Also called pumas or cougars or mountain lions, panthers once ranged across the Americas from Canada to Patagonia. They remain plentiful in the mountains of the western United States. In some places, they are even legally hunted.

But the big cats have been virtually picked clean from America’s eastern landscape. People shot them. It wasn’t for the meat, which is unsavory, or the hide, which is not valuable. The killing was something almost instinctive, one predator’s hate for another.

Development also was a killer, though this sort of suffocation didn’t come to South Florida until the 1900s. By then, the swamps were becoming precious. Drainage had begun.

Urban Growth

Four million people have since moved in where the marsh once reached. Miami has sprawled from the east, Naples and Fort Myers from the west. Two stretches of blacktop connect the coasts.

Left in between is the wilderness often referred to as the Everglades, though little of it looks as it did 40 years ago.

Most of the wildlife is gone. Even the native plants have been cramped and smothered by hearty interlopers. This is now an alien forest of maleleuca trees and Australian pines and Brazilian pepper.

Citrus groves are swallowing much of the land. Oil rigs reach into the moist air. Ford Motor Co. has paved a giant oval test track amid the cypress jungle.

Panthers’ Home

This besieged wetland is the home of the rare Florida panther, Felis concolor coryi.

The cat is distinguished from other panthers by white flecks on the back of its neck, a small cowlick between its shoulder blades and a 90-degree crook at the end of the tail.

Biologists are unsure if the Florida panther has long possessed these peculiar looks or if they are the distortions of inbreeding--the result of isolation in the swamps and thinning numbers.

Actually, the scientists know little about this cat except that it is a hairbreadth from vanishing forever.

“We’d like to know how it got into trouble, but since it’s already approaching extinction, we don’t have many animals to work with,” said Tom Logan, chief of wildlife research for the state game commission.

Shrinking Swamp

They do know this: The shrinking swamp can’t support very many of the wandering cats. Besides, hunters have bested the panthers for the deer.

“Humans and panthers are competing for the same food, and the panther is the loser; they’re thin and anemic and full of disease,” said Dr. Melody Roelke, a University of Florida veterinarian who has examined several of the big cats.

During deer season, hunters in giant swamp buggies lurch through the brush. Engines growl and moan. Tractor wheels cut deep into the mud.

On occasion, hunters have shot the panther as well as the deer, even though the cats have been protected by law since 1958.

The most notorious kill came two years ago when James Billie, chairman of the Seminole Indians, blasted a panther with a shotgun. Then he stretched its hide between two poles in his camp on the Big Cypress reservation, visible from the road.

Billie was arrested, and the Seminoles argued that the panther was potent medicine. Rubbing parts of its tail on the skin can make a man run fast and jump high, a medicine man said.

In court, Billie also contended that authorities had no right to stop him from hunting as he wished on Indian land. A circuit court judge agreed.

Danger From Autos

Most other panther kills involve cars and trucks, speeding in the night. Three of the cats were run over during last year alone--12 since 1972.

“We think the headlights hit the panthers; they turn to run, hit the guardrail and bounce right back into the middle of the road,” Logan said.

Florida officials, anxious for solutions, have contrived various plans for saving the state animal. They are all expensive. They may also be too late.

One is land acquisition. Three million acres of panther habitat, including the Big Cypress Swamp and some of the Fakahatchee Strand, already are state or federally owned. Florida plans to purchase even more as part of a program Gov. Bob Graham calls “Save Our Everglades.”

“Essentially, to save the panther you’ve got to save the land around it,” said Charles Lee, of the Florida Audubon Society. “The panther is our sentinel against the pressures of growth.”

But additional land won’t necessarily help the panther cross the road.

New Highway

In June, work is scheduled to begin to improve Alligator Alley, the two-lane, cross-state highway between Fort Lauderdale and Naples. The federal government is converting the road into a final, four-lane link of Interstate 75. The new thoroughfare is expected to carry 30,000 cars a day by the year 2005.

To safeguard wildlife, the state will add an extra $10.5 million to the project for building the equivalent of panther crosswalks. The highway will be lined with extra-high fencing, forcing panthers to scoot beneath the road through 36 specially designed underpasses.

Locating the places where those underpasses ought to go has been difficult. To find out, state biologists collared several of the cats with a device that emits an electronic pulse. Then they tracked their movements.

This technique, called radio telemetry, has its drawbacks. The two-inch rubber collar itself is unnatural. To get it onto the panthers, the cats must first be chased down and treed by hounds. Then biologists shoot them with a tranquilizer gun. The sedated cat tumbles from the tree into a net.

In 1983, one of the tranquilizer darts clipped an artery. Medication flooded into the cat’s bloodstream. The panther died.

“Since all this radio telemetry started, the reproduction has stopped,” said Robert Baudy, a cat breeder and member of a panther advisory council appointed by the governor. “Those collars change their behavior. Let the animal have some privacy and quiet!”

Complaints about the telemetry program have had state officials nervous. Critics were right. There hadn’t been a confirmed Florida panther kitten for years.

True, there had been reports. One lady said she had glimpsed a panther and a kitten walking beside the tollbooth on the Naples side of the Alley. But somehow, panthers tend to live in people’s minds more than in the wild.

So the search for a cat with kittens a few weeks ago was a long shot. Dave Maehr strapped an antenna to the wings of a small plane. He sat with a receiver in his lap. The plane dropped low to 500 feet.

They were just beyond the Fakahatchee Strand when he picked up the right signal. That female cat was down below, off near an abandoned shed, beside a clump of recently burned slash pine.

The plane circled. Maehr couldn’t see the panther. He only heard the signal. The cat wasn’t far from Alligator Alley. And that was bad. Spook her, and she might scurry right into traffic. They turned home.

Biologists’ ‘Posse’

Back in Naples, something of a posse was formed. Biologists loaded into trucks and drove out to an opening in the forest. Ospreys hovered amid the trees just across the highway.

The men went in on foot, following a path that had been gouged with bulldozers.

“She is out there, she is close,” said biologist Jayde Roof.

He pointed the antenna past some cabbage palms. The signal was strong. They glanced around the brush. They studied the ground.

Maehr was the first to spot a panther track, then Walt McCown. The cat had walked this same open path. They stopped to listen.

“She might circle on us,” Maehr said.

“Might, could,” answered McCown with a shrug.

Tracks of Kitten

It was then that they saw the kitten tracks. A good one by a puddle. Then another up maybe 20 yards. Then one more.

“The evidence mounts,” Maehr said, his voice mock-serious.

They walked ahead. They listened again. They walked some more.

Finally, the road turned. Ahead it changed to hard limestone. The tracks stopped, though the radio signal still beeped steadily, steady as before.

The men strained to see through the dense shrubs.

“Hello, panther,” Jayde Roof said, grinning like a little boy.

But there was nothing.