by Endless Summer
A remarkable tale of survival of Florida's wild cat.
A Small Band of Survivors
When European settlers arrived in North America wild cats roamed the entire continent. As population on the Eastern Seaboard increased, habitat for large predators became scarce.For decades American farmers and ranchers hunted to eliminate predators like wolves and cats, hunted them to the brink of extinction. The survivors moved primarily to the west. But one small band of wild cats moved south. They survive today in Florida’s Everglades.
We know them as cougars and mountain lions, catamounts, puma and panther. Documented by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500’s, by the late 1800’s they had disappeared from the east and the mid-west. Survivors continued to move west, but by the late 1960’s they were threatened with extinction.
