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Still far from city streets but virtually in Tampa Bay's back yard in Florida panther calculations, one of the big cats has moved in, and two folks were wild to catch a glimpse of it.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 23, 2002
MYAKKA RIVER STATE PARK -- Paula Benshoff and I hope to see a Florida panther in a place Florida panthers aren't supposed to be.
They're supposed to be in South Florida, in the Everglades and adjacent forests and swamps. Among the rarest animals on the planet, they are supposed to be lurking in the wilderness of the Big Cypress and the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, the home of black water, ravenous mosquitoes and delicate orchids.
Long considered candidates for extinction, seldom seen by humanity, the tawny cats in that lonely wilderness stalk careless deer and yowl at the silent moon.
The ghosts of the glades aren't supposed to be slinking so near Tampa Bay's back yard.
But Paula Benshoff, the chief naturalist at Myakka River State Park, a 28,000-acre preserve that sprawls across the borders of Sarasota and Manatee counties, can show you panther tracks.
And she can show you something even better.
A photograph. Three photographs, in fact. Taken not in the Everglades, but up Myakka way.
Strutting in the dark like it owns the place is a Florida panther.
"I haven't seen the panther with my own eyes," says Benshoff, who was born and raised in a Florida where she spent as much time in the woods as a pine sapling. "But I'm hoping."
I am too.
"Well, we're stuck," Benshoff groans. Miles from the nearest paved road, she drops out of her Dodge pickup and scowls at tires half buried in the sand. In her early 40s, she is tanned, fit and at home with a shovel.
"What we want to do," she says, "is get out of trouble before we get too deep into trouble." She grabs her shovel and digs her tires out of the mess. Back in the truck, she shifts into low gear and creeps away.
When you're hoping to see a Florida panther, trouble can be just around the next clump of palmettos. When you search for a Florida panther, better pack a 4-wheel drive pickup. Bring a shovel, a sense of direction and sense of wonder. Most of all, bring luck.
You'll need luck to see a Florida panther, perhaps the most elusive animal in North America.
Some people are naturally lucky. Like one of Benshoff's neighbors, Melissa Brewer. She lives on the north side of Myakka River State Park in a rural area. One evening two years ago she was driving on Verna Bethany Road when something big and brown with an impossibly long tail bounded in front of her car and disappeared into the palmetto thickets by Polmerine Hamilton's house.
"I didn't move for a while -- just sat there in awe, watching as his little hiney disappeared," Brewer says now.
Lots of people are sure they see Florida panthers. But almost without exception they have seen something else: a dog, coyote, otter, or perhaps a bobcat, the smaller relative of a panther.
"I saw a black panther in my back yard!" somebody occasionally tells panther biologist Chris Belden of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
First of all, Belden explains, panthers are not black. They are the color of deer. And secondly, he goes on, they are unlikely to show up in the suburban back yards of, say, St. Petersburg. They can measure 7 feet long, including tail, and weigh more than 150 pounds. Yet he has fielded panther reports from the hearts of many big Florida cities.
"They're very secretive," Belden tells disappointed witnesses. "I've been studying them for years, and the only ones I've ever seen are ones we trail with dogs."
But Brewer, who once worked for the conservation commission, provided a believable account. Other accounts, from different people, followed. The state sent its panther team to investigate.
Last fall experts discovered tracks left by what was most likely a male panther just outside Myakka. In January, they set up a remote camera in the T. Mabry Carlton Jr. Memorial Reserve immediately south of the park. They installed cameras in a place where panther tracks had been documented. The camera featured an infrared motion detector. Foraging deer and hogs posed for most of the early pictures. And then -- something else.
Benshoff, the naturalist at Myakka River, keeps the panther photos on the office wall. Every once in while she strolls over to stare at them. Even better are afternoons when she climbs into her big truck and drives into the most remote areas of her park.
Maybe she'll see a panther.
She usually sees deer and wild hogs, ospreys and eagles. When she is lucky she spots a rattlesnake or a cottonmouth. Alligators sprawl on her river banks and even on some of her roads. Not long ago a black bear was spotted hunting for acorns on a popular nature trail.
Benshoff missed seeing the bear. Her chances of seeing a bear are better than seeing a panther.
Think of your neighborhood tomcat. Either you never see it or it runs away the instant you make eye contact. At night, you may hear it caterwauling. But by the time you open your back door to throw a shoe, it's already gone. Tomcats are bashful critters.
Panthers are like giant tomcats, only a thousand times more wary and adventuresome. Your tomcat's territory, which it will defend with tooth and claw, probably covers a back yard or two. A male panther's territory ranges 200 square miles or more -- about two-thirds the size of Pinellas County. That sounds big, but male panthers still manage to run into each other and fight until one is wounded or dead.
Panthers kill each other, but that's not why they're endangered. They virtually disappeared during the last half the 20th century because Florida got too modern.
Much of South Florida was drained, ditched and crisscrossed by roads. Parts of the Everglades dried up. As the glades were compromised, so were panthers and what they eat. Hunting for food and mates, panthers were killed crossing roads. Isolated, hemmed in by development, the poor panther seemed headed for oblivion.
Even more ominous was inbreeding among panthers, which often led to birth defects, including sterility. In the late '80s biologists worried that fewer than 30 Florida panthers remained in the world.
There is some reason for optimism today.
While panthers continue to get hit by cars on back roads, expensive tunnels beneath at least the major highways allow safer passage. Texas cougars, a close panther relative that may have bred with Florida panthers centuries ago, were introduced into the state in 1995. They have since mated with panthers, and their offspring are healthier than the genetics-damaged panthers of the past.
Saving wilderness from development has helped too. Sarasota taxpayers a few years ago voted to buy land next to Myakka River State Park. That's where the panther has been visiting.
Biologists believe the panther population is slowly creeping upward. Adults might number 80 animals or more. There could be as many kittens.
South Florida, in fact, no longer may be big enough to contain the panther population.
Searching for new territories and mates, some young males have swum across the Caloosahatchee River near Fort Myers for points north. Biologists know because at least some of the panthers wear radio collars that transmit their locations.
Avoiding dogs, people and motor vehicles, one panther made it all the way to I-4. Then it turned south again, eventually disappearing.
Nobody knows where it is now. The batteries in its radio collar stopped functioning.
The panther lurking about Myakka River State Park wears no radio collar. Biologists have a hard time keeping tabs.
I have seen two Florida panthers in my life. But it was only because they wore radio collars and I was traveling with biologists who could track the panthers. Eventually the biologists caught and drugged the panthers and changed the batteries on the radio transmitters. As the panthers slept, I got to pet them.
I don't know if I have otherwise gotten close, except perhaps once, when I knelt in the sand in Everglades National Park and beheld what seemed to be a big feline track.
Yet whenever I can, I put myself in position to get lucky. In South Florida I avoid the interstate and drive less traveled roads that cut through the heart of panther territory. I ride my mountain bike up and down remote fire roads through the state's most remote swamps and forests. I camp, sit, wait.
I see nothing, hear nothing.
But my heart still pounds.
When you're in panther territory, you are in true wilderness. In wild places, you might win the Florida panther lotto.
At Myakka River State Park, we bounce down sandy roads for miles and miles. We stop to admire the nest of a bald eagle and thrill at the sight of an Eastern bluebird. An alligator slithers off the road and down a creek embankment. Sandhill cranes preen on the prairie.
I tell Paula Benshoff that I feel it in my bones that we are going to see a Florida panther.
She laughs at the rash prediction but understands that I want to believe in the possibility.
"You never know out here," she says. "Anything could happen. Even if we don't see a panther, how could anyone be bored?" One day she plans to write a book about Myakka for people who are easily bored. She will include a chapter called "How to Play in the Woods."
She likes to get out of her truck and follow the trails made by wild animals. They usually lead to the river or to a marsh. Once she followed a trail to a blueberry bush. Something had a good dinner.
Panthers are hardly vegetarians. They like meat. Myakka boasts a healthy population of whitetail deer. The park -- actually, most of Central Florida -- is overrun by an unwanted population of wild hogs. Hogs aren't native to Florida. They were brought here by Spaniards in 1528. Later, the state hunting agency released even more to please shooters.
Now wild hogs tear up public and private lands, devour small animals and rare plants. Bounty hunters chase hogs night and day and hardly make a dent. At least Florida panthers have a fondness for pork.
"This is the area where we found panther tracks," Benshoff says. We're in a prairie on the edge of an oak hammock about 5 miles from the main park road and about 15 miles from the interstate. The prairie contains thousands of palmetto bushes and tiny plants that Benshoff can identify but I can't. I turn in a slow circle, hoping I'll see a panther loping off in the distance. No chance. If there's a panther, it's hunkered down.
"Everything is connected out here," Benshoff says. Flood and drought, life and death. A small plant grows until a faster-growing plant shades it out and kills it. A lightning-caused fire burns away much, but not all, of the thickets. Within days come the new growth and the deer that browse on tender stalks. Perhaps a panther waits in the part of the underbrush the fire missed. Perhaps it crouches low, mouth open, tongue slightly protruding, watching the deer through palmetto fronds. Every time the deer feeds the panther moves forward an inch.
Perhaps a red-shouldered hawk will cry. The deer, forgetting itself, might turn toward the hawk. Claws extended, jaws gaping and terrible, perhaps the panther will leap. A bite through the base of the neck would be all it takes.
We humans are stronger than panthers. Our pavement, traffic and bulldozers are more than panthers can probably handle. Florida isn't getting any bigger. It is gaining only more people by the day and not the wilderness panthers certainly require to thrive. It's wonderful that a panther is so close to Tampa Bay. But is there enough wild land to support not just one panther, but a reproducing population? Probably not. Yet the optimistic among us like to believe that life will find a way.
We remember that things we never thought could happen have happened.
When Benshoff and I were children, growing up in different areas of Florida, we never saw bald eagles. They were on the verge of extinction because of pesticides. When DDT was eliminated, when eagle habitat was protected, the eagles returned in mighty numbers. Benshoff sees them daily at Myakka, and I see them frequently even in the city.
Kids of my generation -- I'm in my 50s -- seldom saw alligators even in the Everglades. They were almost wiped out by hunting and the illegal trading of skins used for belts and shoes. State and federal laws were passed in the 1960s, and now some people argue that our state has too many alligators.
"Oh, look here," Benshoff calls out, and I stop daydreaming. Walking through a field of blueberries, silver-leafed golden astor, wax myrtle, fetterbush and yellow-eyed grass, she whips out her magnifying glass and throws her body down.
"What is this? What is this? It looks like some kind of egg. Can you tell what it is?"
I can't. Panthers don't lay eggs, but reptiles do.
"It's a mystery," she says. "I love mysteries. I love the unknown."
I look around at the known and the unknown of Myakka River State Park and hope. A pair of turkey vultures circles above distant pines. A crow caws from the top of a runner oak. I wonder if a Florida panther is watching the vultures, registering the cry of the crow.
Probably not. Probably not here, not at this moment, but I want to be wrong. I want to think a panther is crouched in the palmettos, tail flicking, horse flies buzzing around those twitching ears. The panther sees the vultures, hears the crow and even Paula Benshoff's voice.
Just the thought of standing tall in the neighborhood of a Florida panther is thrilling enough.