The great cat sat across from me on the concrete floor of her spacious run, nonchalantly licking her paws and giving every appearance of paying me no mind at all Tracker, a 150-pound Florida panther, was behaving as finicky as Morris, the tomcat who advertised a brand of cat food on TV years ago.
“She’s interested in you,” my friend James P. McMullen explained, “she just doesn’t want you to know it.”
After a bit of playing hard to get, Tracker rose, trundled slowly over to me, and crouched down. I could not believe that I was sitting there stroking the head and scratching the ears of a 150-pound endangered Florida panther. Jim shared with me that Tracker could fell a full-grown deer with one strike of a huge fluffy paw. I was as interested in her large blue/green panther eyes as I was in her outsized paws.
“She’ll try to bite you. It’s her way of getting to know you,” Jim quietly explained.
At that moment, Tracker carefully seized my wrist with her needle-sharp teeth. Jim gave her a gentle smack, and she retreated back to the corner of her run, from which she continued to stare at me quizzically.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I complained. “For the rest of my life, I could have shown the scars to people and said, ‘Now, here is where I was once bitten by an endangered Florida panther.’ I would probably be the only person on earth who could make such a boast.”
Jim, a foremost Florida panther expert and author of the 1982 bestselling book The Cry of the Panther, retreated into the Everglades after serving in the Marines in Vietnam. His efforts to aid in the survival of the endangered big cat became the focus of his healing after the war.
The best estimate is that there are only 120-230 individual Florida panthers remaining in their swampland home. As some die each year from collisions with motor vehicles passing across Alligator Alley and Tamiami Trail, their numbers continue to diminish. Disease and inbreeding among such a small population also take their toll, as does poaching by greedy game hogs. With the advance of climate change and ever rising sea levels, the swamplands of southern Florida may eventually be subsumed with brackish sea water, forever altering the delicate balance of nature. So, the future of the great Florida panther remains very much in question.
Sadly, many apex predators face uncertain futures. The Asian tiger is perhaps the most endangered big cat, with only an estimated 5000 remaining of the more than 100,000 that once roamed across thirty Asian nations, from Vietnam to India and from Indonesia to Siberia. Poaching, habitat loss and conflicts with humans have caused them to vanish from 93% of their former range.
Meanwhile, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the number of African lions has diminished by 50% over the past twenty years. The King of Beasts is absent from 95% of their former homelands. Perhaps 20,000 remain. Only 700 of their closest relatives the Asian lions now survive in a preserve in India.
Because they dwell in such high-altitude terrain as the Tibetan plateau and across into similar rugged country in other Asian nations, it is difficult to estimate the number of surviving snow leopards. Nicknamed the Ghost of the Mountains, snow leopards sometimes prey upon livestock and are routinely killed by farmers and herdsmen. Poachers also kill them for their fur. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature suggests that 4080-6590 continue to inhabit their high-country domain. IUCN lists them not as endangered but as vulnerable.
Fortunately, two North American cats are not so far endangered. While serving as a National Park Service ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado some years ago, I was met one morning by a very excited colleague who had spotted two bobcats perched in a tree in his backyard. He proudly shared with me the photos he had taken of the two interlopers before they scampered back to their wilderness home. The North American bobcat roams from the southern part of Canada to Mexico and is currently not endangered, but it is in decline in some areas.
The lynx, closely related to the shy bobcat, is not regarded as endangered in most places There are three subspecies of lynx, the Canadian, the Eurasian and the Iberian. The Iberian is currently the most endangered variety. The Canadian lynx lives mostly beyond our northern border but survives in healthy populations in Maine, Montana and Minnesota. This past August, one was spotted walking nonchalantly along a road in rural Vermont. Perhaps fifty dwell in Washington’s North Cascades National Park.
Most big cats cling precariously to their existence. The numbers of cougars, jaguars, leopards, cheetahs and ocelots continue to decline due to habitat loss, deforestation, poaching or hunting for their fur or for sport. All apex predators occupy a vital link in the natural food chain, and something magical and mystical will disappear if and when they are gone.
The rest of that week’s adventure, the first of several sojourns into the south Florida swamplands, remains indelibly imprinted in my memory. Jim’s and my trek across Big Cypress, during which the tannic acid in the swamp water dissolved the glue holding my running shoes together, forcing me to trudge miles barefoot through waist deep and chest deep water, is forever imprinted on my memory. So too, our 27-mile-long canoe trip up the Turner River after which, as the tide retreated, we practically paddled through mud on our journey back to civilization. Yet, my brief meeting with Tracker stands out as a unique, almost holy experience.
Tracker, died of old age several years after our friendly encounter, but her fierce spirit continues to hover over that unique swampland world.
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My enthusiasms include fly fishing, natural history and wilderness backpacking. In 1996, I published privately a memoir, Trails of Laughter/ Trails of Tears, featuring my wilderness adventures and misadventures.I serve when needed as a Licensed Eucharistic Minister in the Episcopal Church.
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