The Santa Cruz Mountains Puma Project wishes you joy during this holiday season, and we will return to blogging next year. For our last blog, we thought we’d share a story from Florida, the last home to pumas (called panthers there) in the eastern US.
Recently, camera traps from US Fish and Wildlife Service captured the first footage of an uncollared female lion moving her three kittens to a new den over a twelve hour period. Although called panthers in Florida, they are functionally the same animals which patrol the redwoods and oak woodlands in California.
Mom carrying kitten
In 1995, 8 female pumas from Texas were moved to Florida to save the population from succumbing to problems due to inbreeding. Today, the tenuous persistence of this population of endangered Florida panthers is still continuously threatened by vehicular collisions and habitat loss (see here for a list of all fatalities from this year). Despite these obstacles, these recent photos provide some hope to biologists and citizens who have worked hard to preserve this species.
Here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the fate of the Florida panthers is one we hope to avoid for our own puma populations. Through our research and collaborations with state, local and private wildlife-related organizations, we will continue to identify important habitats and corridors for the animals and to proactively address conservation issues.
We hope you will continue to follow and support our research. See you in 2013!