Going Catatonic

The Florida panther, an endangered subspecies of cougar, is a creature of big, wild country. Once it prowled most of our Southeast, but now it's restricted to southwest Florida. There are about 100 left. "This animal is on a collision course with extinction," declared Larry Richardson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) on the steaming afternoon of June 21, 2004, as we bounced on a big-wheeled swamp buggy through and past oak hammocks, slash pine, cabbage palm, cypress domes, sloughs, mixed swamps, and sawgrass prairies.

Richardson is the biologist at the 26,400-acre Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, 20 miles east of Naples. It's wild country all right, but "big" only by human standards. An adult male panther requires and defends a hunting territory of something like 130,000 acres; a female, 50,000.

Panthers also use nearby tracts of wild land such as the Everglades, Big Cypress National Preserve, Corkscrew Swamp, and Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. But even this isn't enough for recovery, and there are few if any regions of the United States where privately owned wild land is being more rapidly developed.

In southwest Florida nothing stands in the way of a developer—certainly not federal law. If a developer proposes to destroy wetlands in panther country and has not demonstrated proper "avoidance" or "minimization" or offered reasonable "mitigation," the FWS can ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny the dredge-and-fill permit. On rare occasions the FWS asks; never does the Corps deny. When Fish and Wildlife finds that a project will jeopardize an endangered or threatened species, it must issue a "jeopardy opinion," which means the project can't happen unless the developer implements "reasonable and prudent alternatives." The last jeopardy opinion the FWS issued for panthers was in 1994.

Two adult male panthers and two females, one with four kittens, had been passing through the refuge, but my chances of seeing one were nil. In 15 years here, Richardson has seen only three panthers he hasn't gone after with dogs or radio-telemetry equipment. Florida panthers closely resemble their western cousins in behavior and appearance, but they're smaller and darker, with longer legs and larger nostrils. They are widely perceived as semimythical; in fact, as recently as the 1970s there was serious debate in the scientific community about whether they still existed.

But panthers are just a little part of what makes panther country so special. They're an "umbrella species." That is, you can't have them without having most everything else. In a clearing, Richardson switched off the engine, and we sipped Gatorade beneath a massive live oak where a butterfly orchid, one of 43 species in the area, was in full bloom. A pileated woodpecker swooped up into the same tree. A ruby-throated hummingbird perched on one of its branches. Great-crested flycatchers shouted all around us. Earlier, we had flushed a barred owl; later, a red-shouldered hawk, a swallow-tailed kite, a limpkin, a doe and her fawn, and a Florida softshell turtle. The refuge supports crested caracaras, sandhill cranes, bald eagles, wood storks, snail kites, all wading birds native to south Florida, river otters, Big Cypress fox squirrels, eastern indigo snakes, and other rarely seen creatures, many on state or federal protection lists.

Panthers live in what's called the "western Everglades," an apt name when you consider that all the ill-planned, unregulated development that's now costing Americans $8.2 billion in restoration funds in the eastern Everglades is under way here. "People don't realize that panther habitat produces their groundwater," said Richardson, pointing out that the invasion of cabbage palms in the past 30 years is the result of water-table depletion.

"We know how to save panthers. The problem is convincing the public we need to. This cat has to have habitat. If it doesn't, we're going to keep spending millions on a remnant population. And for what? To look at them in a zoo?"

"We know how to save panthers," he continued. "The problem is convincing the public we need to. This cat has to have habitat. If it doesn't, we're going to keep spending millions on a remnant population. And for what? To look at them in a zoo?" Ten years ago FWS biologist Andy Eller coauthored a habitat-acquisition plan for an additional 370,000 acres. It might have cost $50 million—not much compared with the billions earmarked for the eastern Everglades. The Clinton administration sat on its hands; the Bush administration said no.

Eller showed me the rest of panther country from a Cessna 172. From Naples we flew north past Bonita Springs and Fort Myers—over rock mines and sprawling new developments in various stages, from raw dirt wounds to swaths of fresh asphalt and cement. Many were named for what they are destroying—for example, 584-acre Wildcat Run, 196-acre Southern Marsh, 239-acre Cypress Creek, 1,797-acre Hawk's Haven, 1,000-acre The Habitat, and 1,928-acre Winding Cypress. When Eller reviewed this last project, he determined that the Corps of Engineers had misclassified 370 acres of wetlands as uplands. But the developer complained to his superiors. "I was ordered to back off under threat of insubordination," Eller says. Just since 2000 the FWS has issued 20 biological opinions that have permitted major destruction of panther habitat. About 16,000 acres were destroyed or degraded in 11 of these projects; losses in the remaining 9 weren't calculated.