#trapcam

“NEW HOPE FOR THE FLORIDA PANTHER | The Florida panther – a subspecies of puma – once roamed throughout the southeastern United States, but hunting and habitat loss reduced it to a single breeding population isolated in southern Florida. Carlton Ward, founder of the FL Wildlife Corridor campaign, has spent years documenting the recovery of this endangered big cat, now threatened by suburban development and vehicle collisions. Though the population has increased over the past few decades to about 230 adults, there needs to be more than 600 distributed throughout Florida to give the subspecies a chance of recovery. And that means a new breeding population north of the Caloosahatchee River. | A male Florida panther leaps over a creek in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge on the northwestern edge of the Everglades – the subspecies’ last refuge. With the help of scientists, Carlton identified panther trails in the swamp forest and then built sophisticated camera traps that could withstand the subtropical wet environment and react to a fast-moving subject. But with males patrolling a range of up to 518 square kilometres (200 square miles), he was lucky if a panther passed by a camera once a month. And even then, they usually did so at night. There were also the problems of malfunctioning equipment and cameras lost to wildfires and then to Hurricane Irma. So to capture this one and only daylight image took Carlton nearly two years.”