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Report: State must move panthers to save them

Development in South Florida has left few other options for saving the endangered state animal.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published January 31, 2006

	[AP file photo]
	An adult male Florida panther growls as he leaves his shipping container to enter his new home at Big Cypress National Preserve in this 1997 photo.

Booming South Florida no longer has enough room for Florida panthers, according to a new federal wildlife agency report on bringing the big cats back from the brink of extinction.

"There is insufficient habitat in South Florida to sustain a viable panther population," states the report released Wednesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "The prospects for population expansion into south-central Florida are questionable at this time."

The solution: Move some of Florida's official state animal to other states -- wilderness areas in Georgia and Arkansas are the leading possibilities -- in hopes of building thriving new colonies there.

Arkansas officials, however, already have said no thanks, according to Florida panther experts. And the report, officially known as the Florida Panther Recovery Plan, contains no schedule for moving the endangered animals. Instead the plan calls for holding extensive public hearings and coordinating with state agencies first.

Panthers have been on the federal endangered species list since the first one was drawn up in the 1960s. The animals once roamed throughout several southern states, but these days there are far more Florida panther license plates -- 93,684 were sold last year -- than actual panthers.

State officials estimate there are about 80 panthers left in the wild, almost all confined to the state's swampy southwestern corner below the Caloosahatchee River. That area has seen some of the state's fastest development over the past decade.

In the early 1990s, state and federal officials designated 600,000 acres of privately owned land in Lee, Collier and Hendry counties as prime habitat for the panther. Save this land, biologists said, and the panther might avoid extinction.

But since then state and federal officials have allowed people to build throughout the panther habitat, granting permits for a new university, new churches, roads, golf courses and subdivisions.

Now to get panthers off the endangered list, the recovery plan says, the state must boost their numbers dramatically and spread them out more.

The goal: three colonies of at least 240 panthers each, half of them female, maintaining that level for at least 14 years. In theory, the plan says, that could happen by 2051.

But how can government officials triple the number of panthers in South Florida, given the pace of habitat destruction?

"That's the $64-billion question," said Darrell Land, who is in charge of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's panther section. "We know what it takes, and the panthers are more than willing to breed. It just comes down to space."

Florida does not have enough available land right now to even allow the panther population to grow beyond its current level of 80. So tripling that number to 240 "may not be achievable," Land said.

According to panther expert Andy Eller, one of the big obstacles to saving panther habitat has been the agency that published the recovery plan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The federal agency repeatedly signed off on development that wiped out panther habitat, more than once overruling its own biologists, according to Eller. He said his bosses feared angering political contributors who might need development permits.

In 2004 he filed a formal complaint charging that the Fish and Wildlife Service was using flawed science and jeopardizing the panther. He got fired -- not because of his complaints, agency officials said, but because he was slow in reviewing permits.

Last year, however, the agency conceded Eller was right and reinstated him. He now works in a different state. The agency did not overturn any of the permits it had approved over Eller's objections.

The original version of the panther recovery plan, drafted by a panel of 42 scientists, state officials, environmentalists and other volunteers, included a section on the inadequacy of current rules to protect panther habitat, said Laura Hartt of the National Wildlife Federation, who was among the 42.

But the wildlife service stripped that language out of the version it released, Hartt said. And Paul Souza, deputy regional director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the recovery plan will not lead to any changes in the way the agency deals with development plans.

The issue of relocating panthers out of South Florida is also a thorny one.

In 1993, state officials, who wanted to find out whether the panther could make its home in a sparsely populated area of North Florida, released more than a dozen captive-raised Texas cougars near Osceola National Forest.

The cougars slaughtered deer, calves, elk, hogs, a horse and one unlucky house cat. By the end of the experiment, seven cougars had been killed.

Outraged area residents collected petitions calling for the state to stop turning loose big predators near their homes. Meanwhile, panther fans talked of suing to force the state to put wild panthers in North Florida regardless of public sentiment.

A series of meetings designed to find common ground instead degenerated into shouting matches, with some people arguing that extinction is God's plan for the panther.

No agency has attempted any panther relocation experiments since that debacle.

"A lot of the hurdles we would face were made very apparent to us," Land said.

[Last modified January 31, 2006, 19:58:46]