Terry Strickland
One windy morning, on a remote trail in Point Washington State Forest in Northwest Florida, Anita Page saw something remarkable. As she rode her mountain bike down the forest path, she caught more than a glimpse of a creature so extraordinarily rare, she said it had to be a Florida panther.
“I rounded a curve and there was a panther walking down the trail with his back to me,” Page recalled. “He stopped and I stopped and we both looked at each other. He then melted into the underbrush and into the cypress swamp.”
Page said she marked the spot and called the state to report the sighting but was told by wildlife officials that she had “probably seen a cow.”
“As if I don’t know what a cow looks like!”
Morphological differences aside, cows are not known to inhabit Point Washington State Forest any more than are panthers.
Still, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), the state agency responsible for protecting and managing Florida’s wildlife, wild panthers do not exist in the northwest part of the Sunshine State.
Officially, the Florida panther, which once ranged throughout Florida and the southeastern U.S., has been reduced to a population of roughly 70 individuals, all living in the southwestern corner of Florida.
“Where we have Florida panthers, they leave hard, physical evidence,” said Billy Sermons, a biologist for the FWC’s northwest region. This evidence is what is conspicuously lacking in Northwest Florida.
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Although there is no shortage of anecdotal accounts – Sermons’ office receives two or three panther reports nearly every week – the FWC will not investigate a sighting unless there is “hard, physical evidence,” such as a photograph or tracks, to corroborate the claim that a panther was seen.
According to Sermons, there have only been two documented sightings in this area since the late 1980s, and these instances were tracked back to captive panthers that had escaped into the wild.
Also, if there were a population of Florida panthers living in the Panhandle, Sermons said that he would expect to find at least the occasional road-killed cat.
Even when the only known population of wild Florida panthers teetered on the edge of extinction in south Florida, vehicle collisions were a common cause of death among panthers.
For the time being, all the people who claim to have seen panthers in the Florida Panhandle will have to be content with the knowledge that what they have really seen is an otter, a deer, a dog, or, in Page’s case, a cow.
There is another possibility, however. According to Bruce Hagedorn, a wildlife biologist with the natural resources division at Eglin Air Force Base, it is possible that a smaller cat, the jaguarondi, is present in the area and that this species’ existence might explain at least some of the reported panther sightings.
A native to Central and South America, the jaguarondi has a long, supple body, very short legs, and a flattened tail. The cat’s long, flattened head is complemented by a short nose and small and rounded, low-set ears. Morphologically, the cat is often said to resemble an otter, hence its nickname – “the otter-cat.”
Officially, jaguarondi do not exist anywhere in the state of Florida any more than panthers exist in Point Washington State Forest. According to Scott Hardin, exotic species coordinator for the FWC, a jaguarondi carcass has never been deposited in any museum in the state.
However, as with the Florida panther, there have been numerous sightings of jaguarondi. Many of these sightings, Hardin pointed out, come from reputable sources. Some wildlife experts feel that it would be easier for a species as the jaguarondi to “fly under the radar” than it would for a larger species such as the panther.
In Bay County, north of Panama City, the Bear Creek Feline Center is home to two jaguarondi. James Broaddus, a biologist and owner of the center, calls the jaguarondi “really strange lookin’ critters.”
However, as well as being odd-looking, they also share a superficial resemblance to the Florida panther. “They could be mistaken for a panther,” said Broaddus.
The cat’s coat comes in two color phases, brownish-gray to black, and bright reddish-brown. Hagedorn speculates the jaguarondi could explain some of the reports of “black panthers” in Florida. These reports have always been an anomaly since panthers do not actually have a melanistic (black) color phase.
Broaddus and his coworkers at Bear Creek are convinced that jaguarondi exist in Florida and, consequently, have recently launched “The Search for Littlefoot,” an investigative campaign aimed at scientifically proving this point.
However, until someone produces proof that jaguarondi or panthers exist in northwest Florida, both of these cats’ status will remain a mystery, as will the identity of the “cow” that Page saw one windy morning in Point Washington State Forest.
For Page, however, there is no mystery. “There’s no mistaking what I saw,” said Page. “It was…..a panther.”