Earlier this year, a motorist driving near Picayune Strand State Forest, in southwestern Florida, spotted a dead panther on the side of the road. Although the entire population of Florida panthers numbers fewer than a hundred and eighty, this was not a particularly unusual sight. In 2014 alone, twenty-two panthers were killed by automobiles. This animal, it turned out, had not been hit by a car. When wildlife officials conducted a necropsy, they found that it had died from a gunshot wound. It was the second such attack in six months. The previous October, a different driver on the same road had spotted a two-year-old male panther behaving strangely. When the animal was captured, officials discovered that he had been blinded by buckshot. Because Florida panthers are endangered, intentionally killing one is a federal offense, punishable by up to a year in jail and a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. Nevertheless, at least five panthers have died this way since 2008. In the couple of cases that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has solved, the perpetrators were hunters—people who didn’t like the cats competing for the same prey. Florida has a panther problem. Read the rest at newyorker.com

In late February I went panther tracking in southern Florida, flying in a Cessna 182 with Darrell Land, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Service guy who has been working with the highly endangered population of Florida panthers for some 35 years. In addition to monitoring radio-collared panthers from the air, Land’s time is spent mitigating the interactions between the roughly 150 panthers alive today in southern Florida and humans. To date, there has never been a death or even an attack by a panther in the state. “We’re not a sought after food item, we’re completely off the list,” Land explained. But he likes to point to a photograph in his office of a vital, tawny colored panther sitting assertively next to a birdbath in a backyard. “That’s the future of panthers,” he said. “Most people love them. They watch Animal Planet and NatGeo on TV and think they’re neat and cool. If next to that birdbath there was a sandbox with their three-year-old in it, they would have a different view.” Panthers, Land believes, will only succeed if people can tolerate seeing them in their landscape. Recently, this tolerance has been in short supply. For five years in a row, a panther has been shot and killed, a felony offense in Florida. One hunter was fined and sentenced to jail-time for killing a panther with his bow and arrow in 2011. “I don’t like those damn things,” he said. “Down here, it’s been a begrudging acceptance,” said Land. “It was fine when there was twenty or thirty. But now there’s a lot more.”