Every year on the third Friday of May, we observe Endangered Species Day.
At Florida’s state parks, we protect wildlife habitat by managing these critical lands and waters every day. We take special care of the habitats of endangered species.
Visitors sometimes ask where they are most likely to see the elusive Florida panther. Florida panthers are reclusive and normally live in remote, undeveloped areas. That means they are rarely seen by people.
Panthers and bobcats
The Florida panther (
Puma concolor coryi) is one of two native cat species in Florida, the other being the bobcat (
Lynx rufus). Adult panthers are brown, about 5 to 7 feet long and can weigh between 60 and 160 pounds. From a distance, visitors cannot mistake the panther for another animal if they can see its tail. A panther’s tail is as long as its body. Bobcats are much smaller than the Florida panther and their tails are about one-third their body length.
Everglades National Park
The Everglades ecosystem once stretched across a mosaic of wetlands and subtropical wilderness from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Unfortunately, by the mid-1900s nearly half of the slow-moving “river of grass” had been drained to make way for farms and urban development. The park was established in 1947, after decades of activism, to preserve a treasured 1.5 million acres of the ecosystem.
The Everglades is a complex mix of salt and freshwater wetlands, hardwood hammocks, and pine rocklands that support a wide variety of flora and fauna. The ecosystem functions as a giant water purifier, filtering and cleaning water that drains from farms and impervious surfaces before reaching Florida Bay and the Ten Thousand Islands. The Everglades also contributes to South Florida’s climate resilience, naturally absorbing the impacts of hurricanes and minimizing coastal erosion and flooding.