SUNRISE, FL - APRIL 9: Jake Sanderson #85 of the Ottawa Senators skates with the puck prior to the game against the Florida Panthers at the Amerant Bank Arena on April 9, 2024 in Sunrise, Florida. (Photo by Joel Auerbach/Getty Images)
An hour east of crowded Tampa, a search is underway for endangered Florida panthers.
LAKE WALES RIDGE STATE FOREST — Sixty miles east of downtown Tampa, deep in a forest of pine trees and saw palmettos, a camera is tied to a tree.
About the size of a tissue box and camouflaged like bark, this hidden device has captured remarkable scenes of untouched wilderness.
A coyote scurries by, its bushy tail bobbing. A bobcat moseys along the sandy trail. A husky black bear, with a noticeable wound on its head, lugs its way past the trail camera early one morning, and returns in the opposite direction 10 hours later.
But the most important footage this camera has documented came on April 19 — and again two weeks later. A male Florida panther, one of the estimated 200 of its kind left in the wild, struts past under the veil of nightfall. It has a limp but otherwise appears healthy.
“We were so excited. Even if you spend a lot of time outside, chances are you’ve never seen a Florida panther. They are so easy to miss,” said Tiffany Burns, senior director of animal programs at ZooTampa. “We’ve always wanted to document one, and to now actually have it on camera? It’s really cool.”
Below: See the rare footage, documented by ZooTampa and the fStop Foundation, of a male panther in Lake Wales Ridge State Forest on April 19 and on May 2
The zoo has teamed with the fStop Foundation, a West Palm Beach nonprofit, to monitor cameras along the sprawling and sandy Lake Wales ridge. The foundation uses photography to raise awareness about conservation and has 160 trail cameras throughout the state.
Burns joined two other staffers last week on a journey into the Central Florida wild to check the zoo’s six motion-activated trail cameras around Lake Wales Ridge State Forest.
Over a 4-hour trip July 8, the crew drove off-road to each camera, downloaded footage onto a laptop, reviewed each video and replaced the camera batteries. They’ll do it again next month with the hopes of logging more panther videos.
This effort, and the footage it has produced, comes at a pivotal time in the species’ history.
As Florida’s population grows and its wilderness shrinks, the crucial habitat panthers need to thrive is increasingly hard to find. A key to their survival, biologists say, is a northward expansion away from their dwindling home in Southwest Florida.
In 2017, wildlife biologists confirmed the hopeful milestone that Florida panther kittens had been found north of the Caloosahatchee River in Southwest Florida for the first time in decades, and there have been other northern sightings since.
That’s why this latest footage is an important moment: It’s video proof that Florida panthers are migrating.
