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Monday, May 24, 2004
Males are the loneliest numbers
By DINAH VOYLES PULVER
NEWS-JOURNAL ENVIRONMENT WRITER
Lonely panther, 3, seeks s/f/p, for long walks in the woods and possibly to build a family together.
Products of a growing population, young male Florida panthers are wandering farther from cramped quarters in South Florida, looking for a safe haven from older and very territorial males. They face many challenges.
One may be insurmountable without human help. Svelte, young female panthers don’t wander as far afield. So, even if young males manage to avoid the busy highways that do in some roaming cats, they may be destined to live out their lives alone.
Panther experts would like to change that. They say the future of the species may depend on it.
“The two most important things to secure the future of the Florida panther are habitat protection and reintroduction,” said Karen Hill, vice president of the Florida Panther Society.
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Panthers still face many dangers in South Florida, said Manley Fuller with the Florida Wildlife Federation. “If the animals are going to be recovered, we do need to establish other populations.”
It could happen naturally, experts say, but more than likely it will take human help. Just when and how that could occur is still being studied.
Moving panthers is politically and physically complicated and must be carefully planned, say the agencies that would oversee such a project, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The size and suitability of habitat, supply of prey and how the human neighbors feel all must be considered, said Darrell Land, panther coordinator for the wildlife commission.
Young male panthers may roam hundreds of miles. Last year, the state reported a young panther was killed on Interstate 4 in Hillsborough County, many miles from where panthers are documented to exist.
“They’re looking for females, but they’re not finding any north of the Caloosahatchee River (east of Fort Myers) and they’re just wandering,” Fuller said. “It would be really good if they could get some females north of the river.”
That might be possible just by working with large private landowners just north of the existing breeding panther population, he said. However, encouraging the panther north toward the intensively developed Interstate 4 corridor could put the animals in greater danger.
So, don’t look for Volusia or Flagler counties to be on the list of relocation sites. If panthers are to establish a breeding population here, it probably would have to happen on its own and not by human intervention.
Central Florida isn’t highly favored as a relocation site – too many people and not enough suitable habitat or prey. Busy roads and highways were one of the factors considered by a U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service-appointed scientific panel that recently reviewed 11 possible reintroduction sites in the Southeast and recommended further study.
The sites ranked highest by the panel were the Ozark and Ouachita national forests in Arkansas, but two sites in Florida and southern Georgia were considered moderately favorable: the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and the Apalachicola National Forest.
The society would love to see cats in one of those locations in three to five years, Hill said, “but you can’t just drop them out there.”
“The important thing is to continue with planning,” she said. Panther experts know that they’d have to address public perception. In earlier pilot projects with released cats in the Okefenokee, several cats were shot and killed.
The agencies also would like to keep the numbers of human and panther interactions to a minimum.
Most people probably would like to see panthers reintroduced, Fuller said. “But it’s not good if they (the panthers) are hanging around where people are and acting like they’re not shy.”
He pointed to concerns raised about the cats in the West after highly publicized attacks on humans. Hikers have been killed on lonely mountain trails and children have been attacked during daylight hours in less remote settings.
The California state wildlife department lists nine verified panther attacks in the last dozen years, three of them fatal. Only five attacks, three fatal, were reported in 102 years before 1992.
In the 1970s, California field studies counted more than 2,000 mountain lions, but state officials there estimate the population today could be triple that.
No panther attacks have been recorded in Florida and experts say aggressive behavior toward humans is unusual for mountain lions. But in Florida, where the state already runs nuisance alligator and bear programs, officials aren’t especially eager to have problems with yet another predator.
When an adult panther and two kittens began routinely showing up in and around the Pinecrest community in Big Cypress National Preserve in Southwest Florida this winter, the state wildlife commission was quick to intervene.
The cats, commission scientists speculated, had become too comfortable around people because of their frequent contacts with humans. The panthers were harassed and chased with dogs to try to shoo them away and teach them to associate humans with unpleasant experiences.
Decisions on how to react to situations like that should be made well before any panthers are moved, Fuller said.
“If we support restoring the panther in other areas, people have to know that if there’s an animal that starts hanging around then it will be moved or taken care of one way or the other,” he said.
“If we bring them back to the point they’re no longer endangered, if they get restored, delisted and spread across the coastal plain, they’re going to need to be managed. By managed that may mean lethal control in some cases.”
The wilder the area, the fewer the people, the better it is for panther relocation, Fuller said. Programs like that tend to work better, he said, pointing to a red wolf reintroduction in a refuge in remote Northeastern North Carolina, where wolves were released into a vast wetland with no animal-based agriculture programs.
Now, Fuller said, it’s a big deal there to go out to that refuge around Manteo and listen to wolves.
Without human intervention, experts say panthers could eventually spread out on their own.
“While we’re arguing about it politically,” Fuller said, “if the habitat is there and the prey is there, the animal has the ability to start pushing out.”
He and others say that as the state and counties continue to link large tracts of rural land, such as the Volusia Conservation Corridor, it’s feasible that panthers could move along those connectors. The panther has favored the St. Johns River corridor in the past. One of the last confirmed sightings of a panther outside South Florida was in Volusia County, according to state records.
Some experts also believe relatives of the panther may be expanding east from the Rockies, he said. Those experts have speculated that once those western cats get east of the Mississippi River, they may be very successful “ ‘because there’s a ton of deer and a ton of cover.”
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