Cry of the Panther

Florida panthers belong to what is commonly believed to be the last extant race of mountain lion in the East. Like all mountain lions, they are creatures of big, wild country; and they closely resemble their Western and South American cousins in behavior and appearance (although they are slightly smaller and darker and have longer legs and larger nostrils). There is one major difference, however: Florida panthers are among the most endangered mammals on earth. Even today they are widely perceived as semi-mythical. As recently as the 1970s there was serious debate in the scientific community about whether they still existed. There are about 100 left.

Once the Florida panther prowled most of our Southeast, but now it's restricted to Southwest Florida. "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, Cork-screw Swamp, and Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. Although the state and federal government have invested heavily in protecting panthers, most scientists believe the existing management strategy can't succeed, mainly because it fails to protect sufficient habitat. Few people outside the scientific community realize how flawed the current approach is.

In addition, laws requiring control of development if it threatens panthers are not being enforced. If a development proposal in panther country will destroy wetlands and does not demonstrate proper "avoidance" or "minimization," or offer 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 the FWS finds that a project will jeopardize an endangered or threatened species, it is required to 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. 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," where some of the same type of ill-planned, poorly regulated development now costing Americans $8.2 billion in restoration funds in the eastern Everglades is underway. "We know how to save panthers," says Richardson. "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, who was fired this fall after accusing the agency of failing to enforce the Endangered Species Act, co-authored 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.

After meeting with rich-ardson last June, I chartered a Cessna 172 in Naples so that Eller could show me the rest of panther country from the air. 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. Eller told me that when he reviewed this last project, he found 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," he 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 nine weren't calculated.

Eller says he was told to rewrite his biological opinion for Winding Cypress with a "positive" spin and that, when he refused, it was rewritten for him. Recently, when he set out to write jeopardy opinions required by the Endangered Species Act, he says he was told it's Bush administration policy not to write them-for any species.

Eller's real trouble began after June 25, 2002, the day The Washington Post quoted him as calling the non-enforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act "heinous." His work before that had always been lauded with good performance reviews; it even earned him a major award from the Collier County Audubon Society. After June 25, 2002, however, he metamorphosed into a slacker, at least according to his superiors. Eller was taken off panthers, placed on a "performance improvement plan," and suspended for five days, allegedly for being late with a biological opinion. "They backdated the start of consultation and gave me roughly 60 days to do what normally takes 135 days," he says.

In January 2004, he was suspended for 14 days, allegedly for being discourteous to a developer's consultant who, according to written testimony by other biologists, had a reputation for being "difficult" and "demanding," and had even threatened a libel suit. On May 4, 2004, Eller and the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a joint complaint (unresolved at this writing) under the Data Quality Act of 2000, which requires federal agencies to base management of fish, wildlife and other resources on the best information available. Eller was fired on Nov. 5. From his home in Vero Beach, he is now preparing to appeal his termination.

Half an hour into our flight, the wounds in the landscape faded and we banked east into agricultural land, mostly orange groves. The conservation strategy by which the FWS and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission jointly manage panthers assumes that they avoid agricultural lands; therefore no compensation is required when developers convert them to malls, golf courses and housing units. ("We can make more money growing Yankees," the farmers like to say.) But panthers depend heavily on agricultural lands. The conservation strategy, based on daytime telemetry data from the early 1990s, assumes that panthers are restricted to forests. But panthers are nocturnal; they bed down in forests to avoid daytime heat, then range broadly through open country at night. The conservation strategy favors developers, reducing compensation by throwing out not just ag lands but forest patches smaller than two square miles. It even throws out forest patches of any size more than 90 meters from another forest, based on the fiction that cat behavior doesn't change after sunset. There is no academic disagreement here. The scientific community is virtually unanimous in condemning the conservation strategy as a prescription for panther extinction.

At length, the orange groves gave way to cattle range-open grasslands interspersed with clumps of live oaks and cabbage palms, far more valuable to panthers. The conservation strategy also absolves developers of providing compensation when they build on these lands-it defines cattle range as "avoided habitat," but it's "avoided" only by day.

From cattle range we swung south over the Big Cypress National Preserve, wet woods of dwarf cypress with taller trees on scattered domes. At Route 75-"Alligator Alley"-Eller pointed out a panther "undercrossing." Highways are probably the second-biggest source of panther mortality, after the cats themselves, which kill other cats in defense of shrinking territories.

The undercrossings have helped. So has major habitat protection by the state, such as acquisition of Okaloa-coochee Slough State Forest and Dinner Island Ranch in Hendry County, Corkscrew Regional Ecosys-tem Watershed in Lee County, and Picayune Strand State Forest in Collier County. But what has made panther recovery biologically feasible is the injection of genes from eight Texas females released by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in 1995 into a population so inbred that extinction seemed imminent. At this time, Florida panthers had low sperm counts, deformed sperm, poor sperm motility, undescended testicles, cow-licks, heart problems and right crooks at the tips of their tails. Today they have none of those defects. They're bigger and more vigorous. Now when biologists tree them with hounds, they don't crouch and snarl; they leap wildly from tree to tree. In nine years the population has more than doubled. Before modern development isolated them, Florida panthers roamed over vast areas and often bred with Texas cats, so "hybridization" with the imported females wasn't a concern.