‘Path of the Panther’ Unveils Florida Wildlife

There are panthers in your backyard.

Well, not literally, at least not anymore. There was a time before the 19th century when that was likely true, before settlers drained the Everglades and began to build along the coastlines of our now beloved Magic City. Before that, the land belonged to the panthers. Our predecessors pushed them away, but they’re still here, hidden – as Carlton Ward Jr. says – “in plain sight.”

Ward is a Florida-raised photographer who has dedicated the better part of his life to raising awareness toward conservation efforts in the state. Most recently, he authored a book titled “Path of the Panther” that immerses readers into the lives of wild species that eat, breathe and sleep only tens of miles away from where we do.

Driving just an hour inland from a two-story home or condominium overlooking Biscayne Bay will place one in a drastically different environment, a territory so seemingly unfamiliar and yet vital to our survival. As easy as it is to forget, the panthers indeed are living in our backyard – or perhaps we’re living in theirs.

“If you’re in Denver, you might never go out into nature, but you can still see the Rocky Mountains on a clear morning and know that there’s a special and valuable place out there where the wildlife live and where your water and clean air is generated,” Ward said. “You know, we have that same relationship to the wild places here in Florida, but unless you seek them out – go hiking, go paddling, go fly in a small airplane low over the wildlife corridor – it’s easy to forget that it even exists.”

A Journey Becomes Legislation

Ward speaks with a certain authority, having spent the past decade traversing Florida’s wildlife in an attempt to awaken the general public to its existence. In 2015 he walked and paddled with a select team of biologists and conservationists roughly 1,000 miles from Everglades National Park to the state of Georgia, and from Florida’s southern Gulf Coast to Alabama, just to see what was there.

“We were trying to show that we still had a wildlife corridor that could be protected,” said Ward.

In 2017, he presented his story to National Geographic, which advised him that the best way to tell the story of Florida’s wildlife was through the evocative lens of just one emblematic species: the Florida panther.

“That was like a 15-minute conversation that sent me on a five-year quest to try to photograph the Florida panther for National Geographic,” Ward said. “The more I got into that, the more I realized that the panther really was kind of the ultimate ambassador of the corridor.”

He spent years engulfed in Florida’s swamps and forests, returning time and again to the same trail through worse-than-inclement weather, hurricanes and heat waves alike, just to repair or reposition his camera traps in hopes that one would capture a panther in its natural state.

The mission behind his efforts was refined in 2019, when Gov. Ron DeSantis began to push the Multi-Use Corridors of Regional Economic Significance program, coined M-CORES. M-CORES was well on its way to requiring the Florida Department of Transportation to develop three new toll roads in the western half of the Florida peninsula from the Everglades to the state’s northern boundary. In other words, it would have cut right through the home of the panther.

After years of public opposition, lawmakers eventually shelved that plan and passed the 2021 Florida Wildlife Corridor Act instead, which defined the corridor as an area more than 18 million acres large. The law encourages the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to promote investments in areas that protect and enhance the corridor. More than $800 million in state funds have since been designated to support those efforts, and more than 80,000 acres of new land have been acquired for protection.

Ward’s work became a catalyst for those prevailing successes. From the camera to the press to public policy and now to the coffee tables of Ward’s readership, his images have tugged at hearts and inspired the continuation of a movement once nurtured solely by scientists and preservationists.

But the problem subsists.

Dying Land

National Geographic’s 2022 documentary, also entitled “Path of the Panther,” follows Ward’s efforts – sweat, swamp and tears included – as he strives to photograph the last living panthers north of the Caloosahatchee River. The river, originating from the southwest Gulf Coast of Florida, was dredged in 1881 to provide flood control for surrounding counties and is now a more than 1-mile-wide barrier leaving most of the panthers’ habitat nearly inaccessible.

“All of them have been isolated to the southern tip of Florida, where there’s not enough territory to sustain a genetically viable population, so the only way the Florida panther is going to be recovered and stable is by saving the Florida Wildlife Corridor and allowing the panther to reclaim historic territory further north in the state,” said Ward.

The film and coinciding book introduce viewers to Babs, the first female panther documented north of the Caloosahatchee River since 1975. She is both the pioneer for the expansion of her species’ range and the face of an endangered land.

Natural disasters and genetic anomalies are making it increasingly difficult for the panthers to survive, but their most imminent threat is humankind.

“I believe the biggest threat is habitat loss, and that’s through development – habitat loss and habitat fragmentation … There’s still 1,000 people a day moving to Florida. We’re starting to do a better job of building better urban cores and building up, but we’re still building out at a rapid rate. That suburban sprawl in a state that’s only 120 miles wide can have pretty serious consequences,” Ward warned.

It isn’t just the panthers that are being threatened, though. It’s an array of animals whose lives extend wholly into ours. In their framework of connectivity, we, too, have a place.

“What the panther is ultimately doing is showing us what we need to do to save balance between the ecosystem and ourselves,” Ward said.

“Path of the Panther,” the film, is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. “Path of the Panther,” the book, is now on sale and features essays by locals like Native American educator Betty Osceola, as well as a foreword by Florida-born-and-bred writer Carl Hiaasen. It also includes never-before-published images by Ward that give readers just a glimpse at what he calls his craziest pursuit yet.

“I got to know through the back of my camera all the amazing animals that were sharing those same trails – the alligators, the bears, the otters, all the different bird life, the bobcats, the deer. You just saw this rich tapestry of life that’s been playing out for thousands of years, and part of it’s still there, and against all odds, we still have the Florida panther as the iconic umbrella species of that whole ecosystem,” he said.

Ward’s message is simple, and it is clear. The panther may thrive or it may perish. It came and it could also go, leaving behind only college mascots and history books for future generations to remember it by. Whether or not the panther is given its due domain, however, could very well be reflected in our own fate moving forward.

“The panthers benefit,” Ward admitted, “but people are the ultimate beneficiaries of saving this connected, functioning ecosystem that we all depend on.”