Are panthers prowling the Panhandle? Not likely, experts say

FWC

By TOM McLAUGHLIN / Daily News

Published: Thursday, August 7, 2014

There is no shortage of Panhandle residents who claim to have seen the beautiful Florida Panther or heard its haunting screams.

Where the shortage lies is in the amount of physical evidence that the big cats still exist here. The last documented sightings in these parts probably came around the turn of the last century.

“I’m sure historically there have been panthers there, but not in recent times,” said South Florida-based Darrell Land, the Panther Team Leader for the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “We’ve had no road kills, no trail camera photos and no plaster casts of tracks.”

The number of wild panthers living anywhere in the state is frighteningly low, estimated by Land at somewhere between 100 and 180 adult cats.

The big cat’s are found almost exclusively on the southern tip of Florida, south of the Caloosahatchee River, which Land said runs west from Lake Okeechobee.

While some young males have been known to brave the river and venture into central or in rare cases northeast Florida, the breeding population remains south of the Caloosahatchee because no females have been known to cross the river.

“Females are typically more homebodies anyway, and it may be that when they hit an obstacle like that river, which can be a pretty good swim, they just shrug their shoulders and say ‘I’m not moving,’ ” Land said.

Land surmised that Interstate 4 running between Orlando and Tampa may pose another significant barrier for even the bravest of male panthers, and that could be why there are no confirmed sightings, even of a stray cat, in Northwest Florida.

But don’t tell someone who thinks they’ve seen a panther they haven’t seen a panther, or worse yet, that what they saw was probably someone’s golden retriever.

“Wildlife management may not have ever seen the black panther but they obviously aren’t looking in the right places or looking hard enough,” Jennifer Weeks Elmore commented on the Northwest Florida Daily News Facebook page.

Twenty-one other readers joined Elmore in asserting that they’d seen, or heard, or heard of someone who had seen, a panther in this area.

Brock McLean said he was hunting when he saw a panther jump over a palmetto. He claims he watched the big cat for about two minutes and was sure it wasn’t a bobcat.

Jessica Murphy said she used to see one around Mossy Head, but it disappeared about a year ago.

Karo Kuykendall said the first time she heard a panther scream out near Escambia Farms she “thought someone was murdering a neighbor.’

Cool as it might be to actually have Florida panthers in the area, the experts, at Eglin Air Force Base’s Jackson Guard and with FWC, say there’s just no hard evidence to confirm what folks like to think they saw.

“To my knowledge we have not verified anything,” said Stan Kirkland, an FWC spokesman in the agency’s Panama City office. “Next to big foot, I’d say the panther is the most widely spread myth we have.”

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