Florida’s mountain lion record is the record of the Florida panther, and it belongs to the state’s far south. Of 528 records, Collier and Hendry counties supply the large majority, and the named places read like a map of the greater Everglades: Big Cypress National Preserve with 108, then Everglades National Park, Picayune Strand State Forest, and Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park.
A swamp cat at the edge of its range
A panther needs what most of south Florida no longer offers in one piece: a huge, connected territory with enough cover to stalk white-tailed deer and feral hogs. What remains of that landscape sits mostly south of the Caloosahatchee River, in the cypress strands, hardwood hammocks, and pinelands around Big Cypress and the Everglades, and the record shows how tightly the population holds to it.
The last eastern cougar
The Florida panther is the only breeding cougar population left east of the Mississippi, and it is protected as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Long isolation once produced visible signs of inbreeding, and a population this small feels every road crossing and every lost territory in a way a western state never would. Records crest in January, the coolest month, but the cats are on the move in every season, and most people who spend years in panther country never see one.
Status in Florida
NatureServe ranks the mountain lion S4, Apparently Secure, in Florida at the species level; the animal actually on the ground here is the endangered Florida panther population, a far more precarious situation than that rank suggests. The species is native to the state, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous.
Full species profile
