Lauren Ritchie
Things in the world of the rare and endangered Florida panther have changed in past years, and now there is a new reality about 180 or so still-existing creatures:
"Panthers can turn up anywhere," said Marc Criffield, panther biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Even in Lake Jem.
Folks around lakes Beauclaire and Carlton and in the Tangerine area have been emailing and posting on social media their sightings of a big cat after this column last week detailed a sighting on Lake Jem Road, on the south side of the two lakes.
Someone sent Criffield a copy of the column, and he emailed asking for details about the cat. He also encouraged people who believe they've seen a panther to take pictures and report it at public.myfwc.com/hsc/panthersightings/getlatlong.aspx.
Criffield, who studies panthers out of the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in Naples, said the widely held belief that Florida panthers existed only in a limited area of southwest Florida was erased when in 2009 a panther in Georgia was fatally shot by a hunter. (The idiot who pulled the trigger was sentenced to two years of probation, during which he couldn't hunt, and was fined $2,000.)
DNA taken from that big cat showed that he was related to panthers from South Florida, and biologists speculated that he had roamed north.
Typically, the panther who wanders out of South Florida is a lone male looking for love and to stake out his own territory. These are tawny cats weighing from 100 to 160 pounds. They're typically elusive — glimpsing one is a rare sight.
Criffield said in the last few years the state has verified panther tracks in Ormond Beach and had a panther hit by a vehicle in Flagler County and another hit near Yeehaw Junction in Osceola, all north of where they are thought to live.
Last year, just south of Orlando, a panther turned up headless and pawless. The animal had been hit by a car, Criffield said, and by the time the driver ran to a house to call for help and returned, the panther was gone. That quickly someone hacked off its head and paws as trophies. The rest of the carcass later was found in woods. That's a perfectly good illustration of how disgusting people can be these days.
Criffield is particularly interested to learn whether the panthers being spotted this far north have radio collars. He and his colleagues try to put tracking collars on the animals in South Florida to learn how far they range. For males, they've learned it can be 200 square miles.
In 2007, a male panther that was hit and killed on Interstate 4 between Orlando and Tampa had a collar, but it wasn't working. That's the farthest north a collared one has been found.
The commission hires a "houndsman" — a fellow with a pack of dogs — to track panthers in areas where paw prints have been verified and other signs point to panthers in the area. The hounds typically tree the panther.
"Then, we'll set up a net, or if it's real high, we'll make a crash pad, like a stunt man uses. We dart them and hopefully, they fall asleep, and we catch them," Criffield said.
This biologist gig clearly isn't a desk job.
All the tracking and sighting information, along with the number of cats killed on roads, is bundled together to help biologists estimate how many panthers, a sub-species of the American cougar, still live in the wild. Recently, Criffield said, biologists have bumped up the number of panthers they believe exist from about 160 to 180.
Perhaps one of those is around here. A week ago today, the morning the first column about panthers was printed, this email from John Thomas, who lives on Beauclair Avenue, hit the inbox:
"Funny this article just appeared. I saw this same big cat about 8:00 p.m., just last night, just off Allen Street while I was walking my five-month-old puppy. He paused under a street light, at the back of the Chesterhill subdivision, to watch us as we walked toward him through an unlit lot 100 yards away.
"Because he was facing us, I thought it was a dog, but when he turned and ran up into the woods, his long bounding body was clearly visible I've seen many bobcats while mountain biking in the state forests. This was definitely a panther."
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