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The panther was alive after contact,

then it came over here and collapsed.

Okay.

So, let's have a look at it, see what's going on.

He's dead. This cat's just been hit because he's not in rigor yet.

He's still soft. Some wounds on the feet.

I think he must have gotten hit here on this side of the body.

Probably his internal injury that actually is what killed him.

You can see his teeth, Carlton.

These guys, when they're older, right, you get a ridge here.

- And so his teeth look beautiful, right? Perfect.

Perfect, pearly white, so I would say he's a young cat.

I mean, just by size, he's probably got to be a year old,

but based on his teeth, I wouldn't say he's much older than that at all.

This is the number one cause of death, right?

Vehicle collision is number one. But in the last two weeks we have three.

Any time you're losing this number of animals from a population this small,

obviously, it's a huge dent, for sure.

We're gonna reach a threshold, or maybe we're already there,

for this little bit of piece of land that's left for them.

And just a few years ago, this spot right here would have been woods.

Sure.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says

another endangered panther died because of a vehicle collision.

It brings the total, now, to 18 this year.

Florida panthers once roamed the entire southeast,

but are now mostly confined

to just a small region of Florida along the Gulf of Mexico.

These animals are like ghosts.

This is the Florida Everglades,

and a massive effort is underway to recover

one of the most endangered animals on Earth, the Florida Panther.

It's absolute stealth. It's quiet.

It's lethal.

As Florida was settled, the Panther,

a kind of cougar or mountain lion,

was considered a threat to people and cattle.

It's a pioneer that can travel hundreds of miles.

At present, there are so few panthers

that extinction could be just around the corner.

We're destroying so many of the natural habitats in the world

that the species extinction rate

is now estimated to have increased to as much as one thousand times

over what it occurred before humankind came along.

There could be a panther sitting beneath this palm,

staring at us right now, and we would have no idea that it's there.

There's considerable danger and concern

any time you capture and manipulate a wild animal.

If we can cause one litter of kittens to survive,

we've increased the population by 10 percent.

Got it? Yeah, go.

The last survivors live deep in the swamp in areas for which man had little use.

And it's an emblem of a wildness. It has survived over millennia.

These truly wild spaces that we need to help save ourselves.

Morning, Betty. Morning.

Did you manage to keep the feet dry?

Yup. For now.

We call this area "Kahayatle", which is shimmering waters.

The sun shining on the water,

and with this wind blowing, the water rippling,

and the water just shimmering and sparkling like little diamonds.

You know, I'm in an airboat, but what if I was in a dugout canoe,

and this is what I saw for miles and miles and miles.

Because maybe, eventually, it could return to what my ancestors saw.

On a lot of these tree islands, we put our ancestors to rest.

So our ancestors' DNA is in that tree.

That's what we mean, we're a part of the land.

It flows in your blood veins.

It's crazy to think that there was a panther right here.

It is. There's not really any land in there.

Wow.

You could tell that's supposed to be high ground because of that tree.

This is the video from this exact spot.

You could see here, the dry ground in here,

so the water was much lower than it is now.

So he wouldn't have any problems

going from island to island and making his way here.

If I could find just a little piece of dry land,

I'd wanna put a camera trap there.

Just ease your way in, 'cause you don't know what's down there.

You can't see.

If a big python gets me, will you come rescue me?

I'll film it.

In 2016, there was a video of a Florida panther,

and I've got the GPS coordinates.

I'm going to try to find my way to that exact point

to see if there's any dry land left here.

Did you find it?

I know this is supposed to be a tree island, but...

I didn't really find any dry land.

It shows you how hard it would be to be a deer or a panther

trying to live in conditions like this.

This whole island is under three feet of water.

So basically impossible. Yeah. Yep.

- Have to keep looking North. Right.

This is our home.

Just like it's the home to the panther, the deer, the frogs.

This is our home.

And on a spiritual level, this is like our church.

- And now it's underwater. - Yes.

This is the Everglades.

This is one of the most widely known natural treasures in the world.

But we're letting it die.

Our coastlines are pushing in, the seas are coming up,

it's ditched and diked, and actually dammed by roads that cut across it.

These green patches, which would normally be stepping stones of dry land.

They're now all underwater.

And it's just a matter of time before they're gone altogether.

I really started caring a lot about the panther

once I started caring a lot about wildlife corridors.

If we look back, the panther was across the entire continent,

and over time, as we've fragmented and broken up that land,

the only remnant left in the entire eastern United States

has been this relatively small piece of the Everglades,

and not even that island of habitat is safe.

So without saving a wildlife corridor,

there is no hope for revival for the Florida panther.

All right, come on back.

All right. Come on.

It will be all right.

It's been a full circle journey

because I started my photography career in Africa,

but every time I came home to Florida, the landscape was visibly changing.

It took leaving for a few months and coming home to see how fast,

and it was a real wake-up call for me.

One, two, three and up.

Wonderful.

That's what he was going for...

My ancestors moved to Florida in the early to mid-1800's.

My great, great, great-grandfather homesteaded in this county,

in Hardee County, in the 1850's.

And here we go. Here we go.

As a kid, I came here thinking about our ranch.

As an adult, I come here thinking about all ranches.

In these places is the hope for saving wildlife corridors,

that can help the panthers find their new territory.

Here, we're in a strand of oak forest.

Deep, dark green, pocket of woods.

It's the type of place where, if bears and panthers ever come back,

where they might make a den.

It was on a cattle ranch, in 1973,

when the last female panther was seen north of the Caloosahatchee River.

Since then, they've vanished from this landscape.

But the ranches are still there.

And there's hope that someday a female panther will return.

This is where the panther project began for me.

Where my path into trying to tell the panther story,

and I wanted to find the wildest,

most representative Florida panther habitat.

You drop down out of the pine flatwoods, into this cypress forest,

it's like a sense of quiet and wildness overcomes the place.

It's like nowhere else I've been,

and it's the heart of this south Florida wilderness.

You know that somewhere

a Florida panther is stalking through that forest.

Moment of truth is whether the camera fires here, when we try to cross.

Nothing.

Always something.

So something's going on with this deal.

Trigger's dead. Battery 42 percent.

One thousand, nine hundred and fourteen shots.

Got more than a thousand pictures compressed in two days.

Damn.

Got the legs of a panther flying through.

He's like just a pair of feet right here.

This trigger may have picked him up, but by the time the camera fired,

he was already down here.

Where's the first shot? There's nothing.

Makes no sense to me at all.

I could try for two more years, and I might not ever replicate that capture.

The chance of me seeing a Florida panther in the daylight

with a camera in my hands is next to nothing.

But the camera trap,

it's a way to actually have the panther take its own picture.

Your camera is one or two feet away from a panther.

And so it's giving us access to this world.

That's something we've never had a chance to even see before.

This project has been the hardest thing I've ever attempted.

It takes a tremendous amount of time, energy, and luck to get these images.

And it's so far from certain that we're actually going to succeed.

As much time as I spend obsessively trying to photograph panthers,

I think about the land

because this panther is an emblem of this land that is very much endangered.

It's so hard to show the story.

- Lights? Yep.

And you have to show people the animal

in order to create that connection, that love, that appreciation.

It's all about setting the stage. And waiting.

We're going to go out and try to locate

ten to 12 radio-collared Florida panthers.

If all goes well, we'll come back in one piece.

Naples 4-4-1-0-0, Papa Mike.

Right there, with Oscar, wait for taxi.

1-0-0 Papa Mike, roger, runway 1-4 taxi via bravo.

Number 2-4 tango whiskey, contact Fort Meyers departure. Good day.

I'm glad I took my Dramamine this morning.

Wow, you really do some turns.

Yeah, sorry. No, it's all good.

Yeah, so we're on the western edge of the Everglades, Big Cypress ecosystem.

Why was the last puma, east of the Mississippi, surviving here?

It is the last breeding population

of pumas east of the Mississippi River,

and yeah, you just kind of get a feel for how impenetrable some of the areas

as you head farther east of Naples, would be, especially a hundred years ago.

I can imagine this is probably the last frontier

where settlers and people wanted to go.

Exactly.

There he is!

- I see him on the trail over there. Oh, my gosh.

He's heading south on that trail.

Okay. - Should be coming right over him, I think.

There he is. There he is.

- You see him? I do.

We just saw a wild Florida Panther. Absolutely amazing, rare sight to see.

If you're a female panther,

and you strike out on your own to try to find your own territory,

You would only find a narrow ribbon of forested land,

that's getting chipped away at year by year.

This is a turning point.

You can see green turning to concrete,

and land is disappearing before your eyes.

As we've developed this state, as we've developed this country,

these wild places have been cut into smaller and smaller pieces.

These islands, for a wide ranging animal, are a one way path to extinction.

The panther needs that lifeline to the north, it needs the northern Everglades,

it needs the pine forests of the Florida panhandle,

it needs the southern Appalachians and all the way beyond.

The wildlife corridor is a way

that we can save a path for the panther, or it's going to be lost.

All new at 4:30.

Florida panthers are dying at record-breaking rates.

Nearly a dozen hit by cars on Lee County roads, three in just the last week.

It was obvious that this guy had multiple broken legs,

but it wasn't until we got him to the vet clinic

that we really knew the full extent of his injuries.

We think he actually was hit twice.

So once we got the X-rays, and we could look at those injuries

and actually palpate and feel the area where it was fractured,

the back legs I think were broken in one time,

but probably, the front leg was hit even a day or two before.

My options are fix the animal and hope that that stretch

from surgical repair, and rehab goes well,

with all the things that could go wrong, or euthanasia.

There's not a whole lot of in-betweens for wild animals.

And I'm not sure even,

in terms of large carnivore rehab that anybody has done,

three long-bone fracture repair on a large carnivore

and then had successful rehab and release.

I'm not even sure that anybody has done two long-bone fractures.

I think a lot of vets and a lot of people would look at me, individually,

as making the decision, and maybe collectively us as a group,

like we're crazy.

- Five cc's b-vits. - Okay.

The panther team was originally formed

when the population was down to 20 to 30 animals

to try to bring these animals back.

This particular kitten is the very first Florida Panther kitten

we've ever had the opportunity to capture and put a collar on.

We know that we have a problem with survival of young kittens.

And the factors that appear to be important

and may all be tangled together related to this,

are diseases and parasites, possibly nutrition.

And a real clincher, one thing we're very concerned about, is the genetics.

If you look back in the history of the panther project,

we learn collectively as a group,

with this tiny little population of an endangered sub-species,

the info we get from this cat, to me is critically valuable for this population.

Really close to the joint, but obviously, they didn't hit it, which is great.

Yeah, I know, the joint spaces look pretty nice there.

As you can see, he's got the double-plate

to counter those mechanical forces of being a panther

and all the things he needs to do is just to really reinforce those bones.

He's gone through surgery.

The surgery's gone amazing, and somewhere along the way, he gets coined "Tres"

for his three broken legs.

There is a spirit to it, right? This animal truly wanted to survive.

I think we see that in animals the same we do in people

is that there is a fighter spirit.

Hey, Brian. Look, we might have one.

It's small enough to be a female.

A total of three tracks found. One was a nice complete track.

The other two were partial tracks.

And she'd walked there within the last two days.

Okay. Thanks. We'll scramble and see you there.

Okay. - All right. Bye.

For years, we thought it's only a matter of time

before a female crosses the river.

The photo's only two days old. Small enough to be a female.

It builds the excitement, but it's not enough to say for certain.

It's been before my lifetime

since the last female panther was documented

north of the Caloosahatchee River.

You can think of the Caloosahatchee River as the dividing line

between the northern Everglades and the southern Everglades.

And it looks like a line across a map

because it's been dredged into a straight canal.

And that river has been the northern limit

to the breeding population of female panthers

for the past 50 years.

It's a formidable barrier across that landscape,

but you could imagine standing on the edge of that

and deciding to put your foot in and take that swim.

If we can capture the right image,

we can show the world who that panther is.

That's going to be the spark

that lights a much bigger fire to save this whole corridor.

The tracks never lie. 'Cause tracks that small, for a panther,

it's either gonna be a female or a kitten,

and either way, it's evidence of potential breeding behavior north of the river.

Maybe we can pick up some tracks somewhere.

See where they might be cutting across.

Florida panther is the most difficult cat I've ever tracked.

Because of the terrain, also because of the huge home ranges that panthers use.

You need a lot of luck, or you need to be able to follow a trail for a long time.

I think this could be the spot. It's a shortcut.

It's shady, so if they're walking during the day, they're gonna like the shade.

If I only had one camera to put anywhere in Babcock, this would be it.

To be able to pick a spot in the woods

to have a chance of even seeing a panther,

the odds are tough.

You come north of the Caloosahatchee River,

where there might be fewer than a dozen panthers in total existence,

across the mid-section of the state, and maybe one female.

Then the odds are going up almost exponentially.

I have a lot of anticipation of this particular shot,

it's the most important of my efforts

'cause it will place a panther in a landscape

that could be nowhere else in the country other than south Florida.

I'm getting kind of anxious to see what's on here now.

Like, the anticipation.

This camera's been bumped.

More than I just did. Okay, let's see what we have here.

Oh, yeah, there's a bear. Bear cub. Kickass backlight.

Come on, cub, stick your nose up.

Dammit.

The camera's pointed straight at the ground.

This is gonna be under water any month now,

so my chance to get this shot could be over for another year.

To put out a camera and to wait a full month to go back to check the pictures

to realize that bears came and wrecked the camera

the day after you changed the battery 29 days ago.

It's the type of thing that makes you want to just throw in the towel.

Nothing. Nothing.

Getting emotional.

Sorry. It's been a long couple years. A long few months. Um...

Thinking about all the time...

Left flash not firing.

Rebuild lens hood for next visit. Pray for panther.

There's a few along here. Tracks?

Here's one. Some nice tracks. That's awesome.

I don't know what it is, but I'm just fascinated by them.

I knew when I was a little kid that I wanted to work with cats.

I mean, it was just something that draws me to them.

It sounds odd, but like I do feel like I have this connection.

I think this road looks good.

It's a lot of wet area still on either side,

so it's really the best way to travel east and west through this side of the swamp.

Which one did you want to check first? We got how many here? Four?

- Let's check the video camera. - Okay.

There we are.

So we've had nothing break the beam since last Friday.

- Oh, my gosh. Look at that. Oh, my gosh.

- She's amazing. - She's a pioneer.

- She swam the river. - Yup. The hope.

She has this graceful elegance to her.

This female who had the tenacity

to cross that barrier and set up a territory in this new place.

All of a sudden, it's happening in real time, the stakes could not be higher.

Since this female's on Babcock Ranch, we've been referring to her as Babs.

Eleven in the morning. 2:00 a.m.

- Panther! Yes.

The male up here at Babcock Ranch has this big, blocky head.

He's impressive. And you just see the rippling of the muscles.

An unimaginable strength in that animal.

They know how to sense each other,

and they know how to smell the marks that they leave.

So she knew there was at least one male here.

So, she's got potential mates.

To have a breeding female and new generations of panthers being born here,

would bring this whole system back into balance.

As Miccosukee, we are taught to care

for all wildlife.

When the land was new,

the panther's role was to nurture and protect all things.

This is what

the Elders told us.

When the panther exists,

it takes care of the land

and watches over other wildlife.

Myself, I am of the Panther Clan.

I was taught by my Elders

that you are supposed to be

like the panther.

When we were younger,

we were taught

to be still.

When a panther was going to pass through,

we were not to harass it or make it afraid,

You would not be afraid of it.

And it would not be afraid of you.

Just as we have room to exist,

Creator also gave the panther room to exist.

If they no longer exist,

the other animals will also suffer.

As a kid you think, they don't know what they're talking about,

these are just stories, made up.

But now, as a grandmother,

you know, I see that they weren't just stories made up.

It's a wonderment of the panther itself. Somehow, it's still here.

It's still surviving and hanging on. And reclaiming that homeland.

Because it's like a seed waiting to be replanted,

so it can grow and branch out.

This is wild citrus, and I don't know if it goes back to an early homestead here

or whether some animals brought the seeds in a long time ago.

When my grandad would peel these,

the whole skin would come off in one perfect piece.

I'm not quite so good.

It brings back memories.

We'd go stand up on the back of the horse.

or stand up on the back of the jeep

and reach all the wild oranges and the wild citrus.

And he had his favorite spots.

It stands too far.

This section of oak hammock and swamp is definitely one of my favorite places

on our ranch, it's because it's one of the wildest.

I think it's really easy to walk into a place like this

and feel like it's going to be here forever.

But in Florida, this place could be wiped clean just like that.

I mean, I admit, my whole life I've taken for granted that this ranch

would always be here. But all that changed this week.

This is so hard to believe.

Three new toll roads

and one that's proposed to come right through here.

We have the first Florida panther documented in the northern Everglades

in my lifetime, and here comes a proposal for three new toll roads.

One of them would cut right into the heart of her territory.

What this road would do is basically destroy the heart of Florida.

This morning, we're learning about a new bill

that would add three major toll highways in our state.

There's a proposal for more toll roads all around the state.

It's not just them that are going to be paying the price.

The Governor signed one of Florida's largest road projects

in decades, a new toll road.

We're talking about three separate toll roads,

running through some of our most rural and undeveloped areas in Florida.

Look at... Warm and toasty.

Mama, look at all the smoke. Look how high up it goes.

Time to go to sleep!

This is it.

This is really nature's last stand.

And it's going to happen in our lifetimes.

Down here, we do things a little slower.

And my granddaddy had a famous saying that,

"Don't ever get in too big a hurry

because you'll always run past more than you'll ever catch up with."

Is that Kuta? That's you, buddy.

Might wanna just double-check your cinch.

You should be tight, but just double-check it.

- Everybody good? Yes, sir.

Thanks for letting me ride along with you guys this morning.

Yeah, man. My pleasure. I just needed some free help.

Hopefully, it won't turn into free entertainment.

Have you actually got the female yet?

With her cubs yet? Have you got any of her yet?

I haven't gotten the cubs, so their survivorship is

- one in three on average. - Really?

And a first time mother might be lower, so...

So what's the plan here?

We'll throw them back there out on that grass patch right there behind them.

The first female panther

in more than 40 years is right here on Babcock Ranch.

You take a piece of land this size, that panther's got a lot of roaming to do,

and you stop worrying about it getting hit by a Cadillac or a Buick

trying to cross the road to try and find something to eat, so...

You look around at all the big ranches that was here

back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and even some of them into the 90s,

you know, these places are starting to disappear.

It is a dying breed, and I've been hearing that all my life,

and I always thought it was baloney, but now that I'm the age that I'm at,

and I see the things that are happening now, it is dying out.

The Florida cowboy is an endangered species as well.

Yeah, kind of like the panther, yup.

You expect to have complications. You expect something to go wrong.

Or you're at least ready for it, especially with something like this,

where you have three broken legs, three surgeries,

and you're waiting for that next step, when we give them the clear.

Alright, let me go load that real quick into the car, so that's ready to go.

Then I will drop our drugs, and we'll get ready to dart.

- I'll go run and make sure I've got drugs. - Okay. Perfect.

This cat is an amazing patient and healing really well.

Now, we're going to introduce him into a bigger enclosure

and we're gonna give him a place to exercise and see if he can do that.

Yeah, I think he's fine. Alright.

What you're trying to do at any time is make sure that you don't give them

too much in terms of a hurdle where basically, they reinjure themselves.

We just can't close the door yet.

One, two, three, out.

Okay, in.

- Yup. - Yup.

Now, you got to lift her from the metal bar.

They've let us set up a couple of remote cameras and our blinds.

So there's going to be a moment here where this cat

steps on dirt for the first time in a couple of months.

They're just now releasing this panther

into this larger enclosure.

Here he comes.

His surgeries and rehailitation look pretty successful.

This panther is now one step closer to going back to the wild.

So much of these lands are underwater most of the year.

And the water is what defines this place,

and it's what brings the vitality and the life.

In fact, water has been a reality for the survival of the Florida panther.

And these swamps deep in the Everglades,

where cats have been for thousands of years, have been the last refuge.

One panther's come through. Whoa, that's a big alligator.

Check that thing out.

That's a big alligator.

Got one panther walking away. One bear walking toward the camera.

And then two or three alligators before the waters came up

and drowned out my entire camera system.

So we have one more test. There's a still photo system here.

And there we go. We got flashes.

It's exciting.

Oh, yeah, here comes a bear straight at the camera.

Long walk into the water.

Up to his elbows.

Getting a little deeper.

Oh, gosh. He stops for a second. He's sitting down, in the water.

I bet that feels good when you're 300 pounds and covered in fur.

He's chilling in the water. Wow.

Florida still has this wild heart.

And there's this sense of exploration and discovery

happening right here, right now.

Oh, here's a panther, walking straight towards me.

Oh, my gosh.

Cautious maybe because who knows what's in that water?

Maybe that panther's thinking about alligators,

maybe that panther's hungry for alligators,

maybe that panther's scared of alligators? Who knows? It's all a mystery out here.

Here he is again. Whoa!

A male Florida panther in mid-air.

Raindrops are bouncing off the surface of the dark water.

In this project there is so much disappointment,

there's this image of hope.

It gives me the energy to go on.

And I also see that this animal

can persevere in this harshest of environments.

I have a glimmer of hope.

Morning, Joe. Okay. Ten-four. You got all that done last night?

Down there? Okay. Good deal. Good deal.

All right. Well, good, then that'll make everybody happy.

Yeah, for a day or two anyway.

All right, buddy. Okay. Yes, sir. See ya tomorrow. All right, bye.

I guess we're going to be fact-finding and...

kind of making recommendations back to the Governor

on a proposed toll road running north through the state.

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly where the road's going to go,

but if it goes through the center of the state, it's definitely going to open up

a part of this state that's still pretty much untouched.

That's one of my fears that it will open up that opportunity.

Investors and their wheels get to spinning and turning, and here you go.

In two miles, take exit seven towards downtown west.

Y'all know which state in the US has the most toll roads?

It is not California, it is not Texas, it is Florida.

We have 734 miles of toll roads. We don't need more, and we don't want more.

Toll road to nowhere! Toll road to nowhere!

Toll road to nowhere!

Florida is a vibrant state that continues to grow

and requires the development of an adequate infrastructure network.

These infrastructure improvements will be built with great sensitivity

towards the protection of the environment.

Here's the other picture.

That's what we're contending with.

- That was one of your traps you set up? - Yeah.

Here's my favorite one that no one's seen until yesterday.

- That's neat. - I'll send you this.

Commissioner Mike Thompson, DeSoto County.

- Commissioner Elton Langford. - Here.

Highlands County, Commissioner Ron Hamblin.

One thing I know, I researched the website you guys have,

read some of the documentation. It said, "to revitalize rural communities"

was one of the goals of this project. And that kind of stuck out to me.

The word revitalize, that's a pretty strong word, and when I hear that word,

I think that means there's something wrong with it.

It needs to be fixed.

That being a rural community is inherently bad, maybe,

is kind of what I'm thinking when I hear "revitalize," I think development.

I think rural communities have a place in our state.

Thank y'all for your time, today.

And then there's this big dark area

in the heart of Florida where people can see the stars at night.

That is exactly where the highway's supposed to go.

We're at a really pivotal time.

The first breeding panthers in nearly 50 years

are showing up north of the Caloosahatchee River.

What people from this group are ultimately doing is

deciding the future of wild Florida.

On the road again.

The good Lord set it up to work a certain way

and we come in and try to change all that and it...

It don't work. You know, it causes more problems, and um...

I don't know. It's just a...

seems like the more we mess with stuff the worse we make it sometimes.

Damn. It's talking about Irma right now.

On the Safir-Simpson hurricane wind scale.

Fluctuations in intensity are likely to continue in the next day or two.

Irma is expected to remain a powerful Category Four Hurricane

as it approaches Florida.

- It's getting close. - Central pressure is...

Good thing is that my family is safe, in the Florida panhandle.

Far ahead of this storm.

I've got about 12 to 18 hours to decide if I'll evacuate.

And in about 24 hours this entire place could be underwater.

I feel like this powerful context that this hurricane creates

adds a whole another layer to the wildness of the panther story.

Maybe we'll capture an image that brings all that together.

I really worry about the female panther out here.

I've been moving cameras around hoping to get a glimpse

and to figure out if she's still here, and we don't know.

We just don't have the information.

Now we've got a hurricane, a Category Five,

Irma, heading straight towards us,

looking like she's going to come right up the peninsula.

Basically, the only population of Florida panthers occurs right

where this hurricane looks like it's gonna come through.

I just wonder if they have any feeling of this kind of thing coming.

The trail is totally washed out.

I'm doing my best to make sure my equipment is secure

and safely above the water.

We haven't seen Babs in more than two months

and there's a chance we won't see her again.

Maybe she survives the storm. Maybe she moves on.

I think the cameras and flashes are safely above the high-water mark,

but it's still uncertain.

Nature's incredibly resilient. But there are limits.

We can't expect increasingly smaller and smaller patches of nature

to function and to survive.

Those hurricane force winds now stretch

across the whole state of Florida from Sarasota over to the Space Coast.

It was a harrowing day here.

And it was devastating from the moment it hit.

It was crazy coming in here. Power poles snapped over,

pine trees cracked like matchsticks.

The last photo we got of Babs was the beginning of July

and it looked like she was alone. You know we say all the time,

"They're super resilient and they're adapted to hurricanes."

And it's true. But like still.

When we get to where the camera is, we're on the edge of Telegraph.

So that's why I fear about his camera.

If Telegraph spilled its boundaries, it's just going to be coming off.

This looks like the end of the trail for the truck.

This is the highest driest habitat on this ranch

and we're still covered to our ankles in water.

It's a lot of water.

I hadn't seen water go off into that side portion yet.

Oh, gosh. Okay. So there's my...

There's my trigger system submerged. There's my flashes.

This is not what you want to see. That's my camera.

This camera has seen its last picture. That hurts.

How many of these are going to make it? How many of my cameras?

I could be totally wiped out.

This was the last high dry spot

that was in good habitat on this side of the swamp.

So there's nowhere to hide. There's no one bit left untouched.

The female she's in an area that's still relatively new.

Now you throw a hurricane in the mix.

This female will be not just the first north of the river in 43 years,

she'll be the first to survive a hurricane north of the river.

I don't want to interrupt you but there are fish around your leg.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm driving down the road at-- holy crap.

It's waking towards me.

There's a Florida panther walking right towards me.

Holy crap here it comes. Here it comes.

I'll flip the video around and then I'll get my real camera.

Holy crap.

I can hardly believe this.

I'm staring at a Florida panther

that's right out in the middle of the road right here.

Oh, ... . He's walking toward me again.

Why's he do it every time I make a video? Put this camera down.

I can't freaking believe it. I cannot freaking believe it.

Freaking crazy.

There's a Florida panther right under those trees.

Right.

Wow. It's crazy because I haven't looked at these all in sequence like this.

And so one frame is the best panther portrait I've ever taken.

The next frame, the panther turns its head off to the side.

The next frame is a kitten struggling out of the woods.

And then I heard a ruffling coming from these palms over in this area.

And sure enough the kitten came hobbling out of the palms into plain view here.

I went from like intimidated. Excited.

To like a feeling of pure exhilaration staring

into the wild eyes of this panther staring back at me and then

just seconds later, like heartbreak that this kitten is struggling across.

Across the sand.

It's a pretty swift transition from...

this gift of a panther staring right at me

to this heartbreak of seeing this little fella just

barely walk across this clearing.

This picture right here... kills me.

His mother's within reach and you can see him connecting to her and...

pulling himself closer. Getting back up and struggling on.

And then it all made sense. This is why that mother panther

walked down that road so slowly for 30 minutes

because she was waiting for her injured kitten to keep up.

Biologists have announced that this has happened and been observed

in eight different cases around southwest Florida.

It's probably caused by us.

Something that we've put out into nature.

We're following up on a story we first brought you yesterday

about new video showing a mysterious health problem affecting Florida panthers.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

recently released the footage from trail cameras

that show the endangered cats stumbling

and now investigators are working to figure out just why.

So, Lara, I'm going to go grab the vaccines, if you're good.

I think we're good.

My thought process is they likely were exposed to a milder exposure or dose

of whatever is causing this, which we still don't know.

and hopefully, they'll remain static and there'll be no progression.

So that bit of sign that we see is hopefully all we'll see in these guys.

- This one are all right? - Yeah.

I'm so glad that they are not so badly affected.

That kitten that you got photos of was the most severely affected.

Well, maybe these guys are going to give you some answers.

When you have an animal isolated, one big storm,

one new disease can bring this cat back to brink of extinction.

This is why Babs is so important to the future of her species.

What the panthers need, and the whole ecosystem needs the lifeline to the North.

We are probably seven months of rehab now.

I think he was June of last year so we're just about seven months.

And today we're releasing him.

We moved him from the small enclosure to a larger one which is about 11 acres

and after transition of a few small items like armadillo-sized animals,

raccoons he could catch, he was offered live deer in that enclosure.

And it wasn't until he kind of "went missing" off of camera

for a few days, the introduction of the deer

that we knew he was doing what he needed to do.

He had hunted the deer, killed it, and was feeding on it.

It really was sort of the end point for us realizing that he was ready to go.

All right. Showtime.

When we're looking at decisions in terms of where we release Tres,

You're looking at a map, saying my options are not what they should be.

Where do I enough green space that's truly wild to put a wild animal back into it?

High five on that one. Good job.

- Walking... - Well done.

That was awesome.

- Great, right? - Yeah.

- That's awesome. Right over the top. - He is fast.

Everything is so completely interconnected.

We've got to be aware of it or those lands won't be there.

You can't have wildlife if they have nowhere to live.

Got a lot of game here already.

Telling me they're mad at me because they tore my little feeder up

and got all the corn out of it.

Set our feeder up just to find out what's coming in, what's going on,

and we got a few old hogs sneaking in here

but mostly just deer and cranes. And whooping cranes love corn.

Just an old muddy camera.

I'm seeing if I've got any panthers or bears on it so I can show Carlton

how to take a real picture without having to spend all that money.

And I've even got some high-tech stuff that I found.

I don't know if you can see my stick.

That's a stick there to keep it leveled up because the tree leans a little bit.

There's only so many pieces of unspoiled paradise left, you know.

You know they get you squeezed down to a certain spot,

it really ain't worth your time and effort to farm.

It's hard to believe this pasture is going to be covered in rooftops.

What's our plan today?

We slip out here around these heifers and move them,

put 'em in a new field. We're going to rotate them,

and move them over to another pasture.

Always got me when I see development going on I look, and I say,

"That will never be productive for agriculture again."

But you've got to leave places for people to farm.

You've got to leave areas for these wildlife.

If you was to put a big road through the middle,

it may entice folks to say,

"Look at all this land, here, they're doing nothing with

but have a few cows or they're farming.

You know we can pick that up fairly cheap."

Land went from $2500 an acre

to $20,000 an acre within six to eight months.

We had people coming here buying big tracts of land. 20,000 bucks an acre.

There's no way I can put enough cows on it, farm crops,

and even plant some marijuana on the edges and pay for this thing.

But yet these people are coming here and spending all that money.

I talked to them guys I said,

"Man, how in the world do you recoup your money back."

And the guy told me, "Well, you're looking at it wrong.

You're looking at what the land can produce.

I'm looking at how many houses can I put on that acre?"

I don't know the answer to it to be honest with you.

I know that they're not spending a million dollars to buy a piece of land to preserve

a farmer what he does for a living

but they'll spend that money on that cat.

But if me and that cat can get along, we all benefit from that.

Yo, man. Come here, buddy. What are you doing?

We need to protect them as much as we can

because if we've got habitat for them that leaves habitat for us.

So I had actually gotten to be kind of numb almost.

It had been so many months of not getting anything

and I see an alert pop up on my phone.

Here's another empty photo, or a pig, or something.

And I open it up and it's this lo-res picture that looks like her.

Okay, we're going to walk in this trail to where my camera is.

She was just here like two hours ago.

Just trying to see if there's tracks. There's a lot of vegetation on the ground.

So I got your text at like 6:15 this morning.

Sorry. I got a little excited. He came through on the tenth.

So the male was here just a couple days before.

- Yup. See. - Getting close.

Oh, yeah, I figured we'd find one of these.

- If she came across this scrape. - She'd probably come by and sniff it.

She'd check it out. That's exciting.

- It's like 20 feet from the camera so. - Yeah.

- That's a good spot they chose. - Yup.

Cameras going. That's a good thing.

The question is which direction was the camera facing?

Yeah. System is go.

Five hundred and sixty-one beam breaks.

This thing has been knocked

but it didn't break the alignment enough to where it stopped working.

But here's to hoping. Yeah, this camera is...

pretty much perfectly composed for a picture of the oak canopy above us.

There's no chance it'd be able to get a picture of an animal

unless it was standing above it looking down.

The question is when did it get knocked?

And when did the panthers come? Sky, sky, sky on the 19th.

Wouldn't it be nice if she had walked over it?

Would've been nice if the cows hadn't knocked this camera.

Because that was the first time, and there's the culprit right there.

Big old floppy ears on that Angus.

This is where I'm starting to get pretty anxious.

We just had about 200 pictures of cows but we're back to a level horizon.

There's a panther. There's a panther at 3:30 in the morning.

It's her. No.

It's a kitten it's got spots. No. That's a panther kitten.

Oh, my gosh.

- And look, look. Look behind her. Oh, my God.

Right there. - That's two kittens.

Oh, dude. - Look, they're sniffing the scrape.

Look at her face. She does look like an annoyed mom.

Oh, dude.

If one or both of these are females, like, that's just even a bigger deal.

- Here's to hoping these are females. - Yes.

This right here, is showing you a picture of the first verified female

north of the river in 43 years but now she's got two kittens behind her.

What are they sniffing?

They're sniffing the scrape of a male panther that's been up here for awhile.

Yeah. So we've got a Florida panther family.

We've got the future. This is a big deal.

Nature is a great teacher. And the animals, the plants, the water,

they're part of nature's way of teaching you.

The animals, they don't see those lines.

Those divisions that are created. These imaginary lines.

For them, they still see that system connected

and they are trying to get to the areas that they knew.

It's still there. That knowledge is there somewhere.

It's waiting for you to bring it back forward to the present.

There is that possibility to have those corridors throughout the United States.

You guys ready to see my first story in National Geographic magazine?

Sure. That's awesome.

How in the world did you take that picture?

That's a camera trap.

That panther, that's a mommy panther with three kittens.

- What's that remind you of? - Mommy and the three of us.

A bill to be entitled an "Act Relating to the Protection of Ecosystems."

Thank you Mr. Speaker. This is the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act.

Have all members voted? Have all members voted?

The clerk will lock the machine and announce the vote.

One hundred and fifteen yeas and zero nays, Mr. Speaker.

The bill passes.

The panther is showing us that it's not too late.

It's showing us that these remnants of nature can still be reconnected.

And if we do that, there's no limit

to the scale of life and balance we can bring back across this entire continent.

To see the way this story can unify and bring people together,

I have tremendous hope of what wildlife corridors can do

to bring people together across the entirety of this country.