ROY McBRIDE - Rancher's Supply Inc., P.O. Box 725, Alpine, TX 79831

Around 1972, the World Wildlife fund contracted with me through Dr. Ron Nowak of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to look for panthers in Florida. At that time there were two schools of thought regarding the panther. One group thought there weren't any left. Another group, which included Dr. Jim Layne of Archbold Biological Station, thought more than 300 remained. Dr. Layne based his estimates on observed sign and was convinced a population remained.

I do not know what the official position of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission was at that time, but I talked to one biologist who thought, based on hear-say, they were extinct. He said he never had seen any tracks or any indications there were any left. So there really was not any kind of scientific information about if they still existed, where they were or how many were left.

My initial work lasted four to six weeks. I looked in various areas of south Florida. I started around the Lykes' Brothers' ranch in Highlands County and worked southward to the Big Cypress. I found evidence of some panthers. Not many, but a few.

The next year, Dr. Nowak employed me to do the same search again. And I essentially went to the same areas, only I was a little more thorough. I did not find any more evidence than I did the year before. But for two consecutive years, I Believe '72 and '73, we did find evidence of panthers. And this was reported in the World Wildlife Yearbook for those two years.

After these initial two surveys I did not hear from anybody for some time. I never thought much about it. I was amazed to find them. I mean, I got down here in this thickly settled area, and I was really surprised there were any left. But nothing was done about it until, I believe, it became an endangered species. Then Chris Belden of Florida Game and Fish got involved. He called me up and wanted to know where I found them and that sort of thing.

He indicated he was going to start looking for them. I encouraged him to come to west Texas and learn what the tracks looked like, and urine markers, and droppings and so forth, so he could conduct investigations in Florida.

He and Jim Brady came out to west Texas and spent a week or so. We saw lots of mountain lion tracks and other sign. After he returned to Florida things went on from there. Chris got permission to start doing some preliminary work. He employed me for 30 days or so to see if he could catch a few cats. And we did.

Back in those days we did not have swamp buggies. We did not have ATV's. We just walked. Generally the team consisted of me and Chris. Occasionally Sonny Bass from Everglades National Park would come over and help. There was another commission employee, Bill Frankenberger, that helped intermittently. Christ would give me a walkie-talkie, and I would start out in some area we had found sign and I would work the area with the dogs. Chris would drive around on the other side to pick me up. That is how the telemetry program got started. This slide shows panther habitat in the southwestern part of the United States. This would be in Texas looking south into Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of habitat that really has a low human impact. Very few people live here. All of northwestern Coahuila and northeastern Chihuahua join western Texas at one point there. It is just a desert area, desert mountains. Some of the higher mountains have timber, but in general it is a real primitive form of agriculture, just grazing, or no agriculture at all. In these kind of conditions, mountain lions do real well. This is some of the extremes in the variation of habitat they live on.

This is Florida, Everglades Park. The dark areas are tree islands that are above the water level when it is wet. The areas in between are sawgrass prairies. This is a difficult area to work in. We use different ways of getting around there than in some of the other areas. This is an extremely flat area, as compared to the mountains you just saw in the last picture. However, the same kind of animal lives there. He is really adaptable, obviously.

This is some of the Big Cypress habitat; cypress prairies, and hardwood hammocks next to them. We generally use swamp buggies to get around in here.

This is what we were looking for: panther tracks. We do not go out expecting to actually see panthers. We initially go out and look for evidence that they have been there. I calculated one time that if a panther moves six or seven miles in a night and its strides are nineteen to twenty-two inches long, he would leave something like nineteen thousand or thirty-eight thousand tracks. Of course, all of them would not be visible. Some of them would be on hard surfaces. But out of that number, at least some would be expected to be maintained by some kind of soft medium, like mud. There is going to be evidence left. What you are really looking for is evidence that the animal lives there. We did not go by actual panther sightings. We went by evidence of their existence. If we could not find physical evidence, we did not consider the area to be occupied by panthers. So tracks are one of those things we look for, obviously.

This is a sign of a female with a kitten. So that is evidence that two of them passed there. That to me is hard evidence. That is the kind of evidence you can build a case with.

Here is one of their droppings -- scat -- of a mountain lion. The flashlight in the corner helps document size. They are kind of jointed and twisted like a bobcat's dropping, always have hair and bones in them.

That is a urine marker -- scrape. It is made by their hind feet prior to urinating. They squat down and stroke their back feet backwards in about a six or eight inch stroke. It leaves a little pile of debris. This is where they drop a few drops of urine. That is one of the methods cats use to communicate with one another. A tool for keeping up with each other. We use the same method to find them. We found that males and females both make scrapes. The females did it when they were in estrous, and the males just did it whenever they were moving about.

This is two thousand miles away from the last scrape, same thing, same species. You could see this in Argentina or west Texas, or British Columbia, same characteristic marker, made the same way.

here is another way we used to find panthers. Vultures are attracted to their kills. They usually kill large animals. And when they do, there is food left over they cannot eat, so vultures come to the scene. And a panther hunter usually watches for things like that. Somebody else on the program later will get into panther diet, food habit, but feral hogs and deer are two of the principle food items taken in Florida.

The preceding represent indicators used to determine the presence of Felis concolor throughout North, Central and South America. Over the years many people have reported panther sightings in various locations throughout Florida. If we were unable to find tracks, or urine markers, or dropping, or a kill, or some type of sign that could be confirmed as panther, we would wonder about the validity of the sighting report. Panthers cannot exist without leaving behind physical evidence.

As indicated earlier, much of the area we have worked in south Florida is extremely wet, muddy and hard to get around in. For that reason we use swamp buggies much of the time now. The first couple of years we mostly worked afoot. Once we locate an area with panther sign the capture team will generally split up and look for fresh sign. At the same time I will take the dogs and let them cast about for sign. We cover more country that way. In the Everglades, because of restrictions on the use of land vehicles within most of the area, we use a helicopter a good bit. It is used to drop me and the dogs off at a tree island. After working that island we walk to another, and so on until it either gets too hot to safely hunt and the helicopter picks us up, or we tree a panther. If we tree a cat, I radio our location and the helicopter brings in the rest of the capture team. The cat is immobilized and radio instrumented.

In all we have probably captured (treed) over 70 different panthers over the years. But we have not radio-instrumented all of them. Like the real old female shown in this slide. If we thought a cat's physical condition was questionable, too old or too stressed after the chase, or too high in the tree or too much water around the tree, or any other factor that we felt would compromise the health/safety of the cat, we would elect not to immobilize and collar.

In west Texas or the mountains of Mexico, we use different kinds of transportation. We use mules instead of swamp buggies. Some of the cats we captured in Texas are being used in the north Florida reintroduction feasibility study. If dogs can catch cats in one place, they can catch them in another. There are no big trees in south Texas, just flat mesquite brush and lots of prickly pear, so there is not much for a cat to climb to get away from the dogs. However, their actions are the same, whether they are in Argentina, British Columbia, or wherever. If they can, they try to get up on a rock or up in a tree to get away from the dogs.

You can see the kind of areas the cats in west Texas inhabit. It is a real contrast to the reintroduction study area in north Florida/south Georgia. But they seem to adapt real well. Most of the animals in the first study gained weight. Chris will give you details on this study later.

We train these dogs by repetition. We hunt cats with them. When we are not working in Florida, we work other places catching cats. We use them to catch jaguarundi, ocelot, and jaguar. About half of those we tree. The other half stay on the ground. They kill lots of dogs.

It is the same procedure wherever we go working with cats, we look for clues. Most are nocturnal. They are secretive. You hardly ever see them. So you look for clues. In this case it is the track of a leopard in South Africa. Without the evidence, we could make no conclusions that cats are in the area.

This is a slide of a predator control program. It probably alarms you. There are probably thirty or forty mountain lion in this picture. They were all taken from an area where there were rumors that mountain lions are doing damage to livestock. But these kind of harvests are sustained year after year after year, because the habitat is large. In Florida, this kind of harvest would totally wipe out the Florida population. The difference, of course, is the remaining space available to cats in Florida. There lies the problem.

QUESTIONS:

MS. LAURIE MacDONALD. My question is somewhat of a comment and is addressed both to you and to someone perhaps from the Game Commission who would be willing to answer. I receive occasionally, concerns expressed from people who have reported panther sightings, etc. to the Game and Fish Commission. In more cases than not the person receiving the report shows no interest at all, and many times informs the person that the Commission is not taking that kind of information any longer. I'm worried for a couple of reasons about that response. Primarily, of course, for the panther itself, and sustaining the population, and secondly, for the image of the agency, because the reports that I get from people are that the response of the agency is not polite, really, kind of disdainful. And I would hope that the Commission and others would accept the reports and give a better image of the agency, which we all want to support so much.

MR. McBRIDE: That is a good comment. my response is that we have worn ourselves out checking out such reports, all of us on the project -- Game Commission people, Park Service people, refuge people, etc. We usually try to go look. In many cases we go look even when there is no hope of finding anything. We do not just blow these reports off. We try to substantiate it by finding some kind of evidence. An sometimes these sightings turn out to be real. But in most cases they are not. But, I have never been around anybody who was impolite, and I have been around everybody on the project. So I do not know who has been rude to them, but it is not the folks in the field that are looking for panthers.

MS. MacDONALD: I think maybe it is the first person they talk to sometimes, not the field people. Most of these call are probably being handled by local or regional Commission offices. I think that is where the problem is. So I suggest that there be a better response. And for those people who do report these sightings, I generally would say to try and get a cast of the track or something. Is there any other suggestion I should give to the people?

MR. McBRIDE: I am going to let Chris Belden or Walt McCown with the Game Commission handle that, because they are the guys that would handle that.

MR. BELDEN: (INAUDIBLE)

MR. McBRIDE: Okay, Chris will cover this in the next presentation.

MR. BRIAN HUNT: You have probably seen more cats up close around the world, more numbers of cats around the world. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your impression of the physical condition of the Florida cats, and compare them to some of the other cats you have come in contact with.

MR. McBRIDE: Well, you know, this is a humid climate. There are a lot of mosquito problems that time of year, so their pelage will not be as attractive, as say, a cat in a northern, colder climate, but they vary. The real old ones, some of them are poor. But some of the younger cats are beautiful and in good condition. So I really can't say that I noticed any kind of overall difference, just individual differences in the ones I have caught.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (INAUDIBLE)

MR. McBRIDE: I think that was an age problem with her, that was my impression. she looked like a real old cat. And I have caught old ones elsewhere that were also rather poor. I would say again was the cause of her problem. And as indicated, we did not attempt to radio-instrument her, so we did not get to look at her closely. It is just my feelings.