Every now and then I’ll drive out to Flatwoods Wilderness Park outside Tampa, FL; they have a paved seven-mile loop through the woods intended for bikes and roller skates, although I prefer to hoof it myself. Florida weather being what it is most of the year, wildlife is usually best viewed at dawn and dusk. A few years back, one of those big-ass housing developments went up right next door, so the sense of isolation is not what it once was, alas. Still, they retain an impressive variety of representative scrub pine fauna, including whitetail deer, gopher tortoises, indigo snakes, sandhill cranes, bobcats, opossums, armadillos, razorbacks, the occasional alligator, and four out of the state’s six venomous snakes. I’ve heard some park staffers also boast of black bear and a Florida panther in or around the park somewhere, although I’ve never seen traces of either.
One morning a few years back, I arrived just as the park was opening. There was still a thick lingering ground fog along the trail. About a mile and a half into the loop, an elongated feline shape darted across the trail. It was too large to be a bobcat; it was too close to the ground to be a panther. I only had a quick look at it, but it was a cat like nothing I’d ever seen before, long, lean and grey, like a cross between a wildcat and an otter.
I asked the park staff about it later; most insisted that I’d seen a bobcat, while the others thought I’d managed to glimpse the Florida panther supposedly living in the area. By chance, some time later I happened across a book on Florida wildlife that mentioned it. What I had seen was a jaguarandi, a species of cat found from the American Southwest through Central America. Evidently it was intentionally introduced in Florida back in 1942 for some reason, at Hillsborough State Park, only a few miles away from Flatwoods. The wildlife book stated that although a road-killed jaguarandi was identified as late as 1961, no one is sure whether the species still continues to survive in Florida. I can personally affirm that they do, or at least they did until two or three years back.
Another time I was driving through Seminole, across the bay from Tampa, and while stopped at an intersection I spotted an Audubon’s Crested Caracara perched on a streetlight. At that time I had no idea what I was looking at, so back to the library I went. The Florida population is reproductively isolated from the subspecies found elsewhere, and is classified as threatened; supposedly there are only about 150 to 300 of them.
