Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Sleek panthers, growling bears and enormous alligators inhabit the vast Florida Everglades in a new film, “Path of the Panther,” captured by world-renowned National Geographic Explorer and photographer Carlton Ward Jr.
The award-winning film is part of a broader “Path of the Panther” project supported by the National Geographic Society that contributed to passage of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act — the first legislation of its kind and an international blueprint for addressing habitat loss and species extinction.
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The film picked up honors at several film festivals and was released in more than 40 theaters and will be available on National Geographic, Hulu and Disney+ starting this month. Executive producer is award-winning actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio of Appian Way Productions.
The film’s director, Eric Bendick, told ICT the near-extinction of the Florida panther echoes many of the same issues faced by P-22, a Los Angeles panther that survived alone in a park until becoming old and injured.
“There’s an incredible amount of crossover in terms of our story and the P-22 story,” director Bendick told ICT from his home in Bozeman, Montana. He previously directed a series of films around the Florida Wildlife Corridor expeditions, including “The Forgotten Coast,” “Chasing Ghosts” and “The Last Green Thread.”
“The impact of P-22 and our Florida panthers have been all about explaining to people in the world how these kinds of connected landscapes are working or not working today,” he said. “So, P-22 is just a perfect model for some of the same ideas.”
The film was made with support from the Miccosukee Tribe and many other organizations. Among those featured in the film are Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee Everglades educator, airboat captain, conservationist and clean water advocate.
“It’s incredible, the hard lines that go from the swamp to the developed lands and how stark that contrast is,” Bendick said. “But one of the things that the story uncovers is really that even though they seem apart, they’re impacting one another all the time. The developed lands are flooded from storms these days. They’re literally channeling all that water into the Everglades and the runoff is more than it can sustain, so it’s flooding this whole section of tree islands, which is Betty Osceola’s homeland.
“Betty is a Miccosukee from the Panther Clan and is in the film speaking about the tribal connection to the land and animals. She says the panther is the force of balance that brings the ecosystem into harmony.”
The film will be available on National Geographic starting Saturday, April 22; on Hulu, Sunday, April 23; and on Disney+ starting April 28.
Years of field research
Reaching near extinction in the 1950s, the Florida panther was added to the U.S. endangered species list in 1973.
The population has since rebounded from fewer than 30 adults to nearly 200 today, but the species faces an alarming number of new challenges. Its survival now depends on the protection of a network of statewide public and private lands known as the Florida Wildlife Corridor.
Drawn in by the specter of the Florida panther, photographer Ward and a coalition of biologists, ranchers, conservationists, and Indigenous peoples from the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes of Florida, found themselves on the front lines of a battle between forces of renewal and destruction that have pushed the fragile Everglades to the brink of ecological collapse.
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The odyssey took more than five years of field research, with 500,000 still images and more than 800 hours of camera-trap footage. The result is that wild panthers are captured in their native ecosystem as they never have before on film.
When the project began, Bendick was right out of graduate school and was working on a similar subject, a film about the road system across the U.S. and how it was affecting wildlife.
“This theme has come up in my work a lot over the past couple decades,”Bendick said. “I’ve done some short films as well that have similar ideas, but until this panther film we really never found the perfect kind of emblem of that idea. It is amazing that people finally understand it through seeing this animal and what it’s brought.”
Bendick said he had done a previous film with Ward, who dedicated more than five years to photographing and filming the panther film.
“The previous project that we worked on together was an expedition where we filmed a journey from the Everglades headwaters all the way to Alabama, and we walked, paddled or biked the entire way for 80 days,” Bendick said.
Bendick says Ward moved to the swamp, to live there for a couple years while photographing the project.
“We were thinking to ourselves, ‘We may get a couple glimpses of a panther, minimal photos or video, it’s incredibly hard.’ In time, we figured out how to actually film them, and we ended up getting more and more content and being able to track individuals through the landscape and even uncollared cats, which is really difficult to do.”
‘An Indigenous rights story’
The film got even more interesting when a female panther they nicknamed Babs became the first panther in nearly 50 years to move from the core southern Everglades into the northern Everglades.
“There had been no females there for over 50 years,” Bendick said. “So, she was starting the seed of a new population. When we determined there’s this female living here, that was the window into our story becoming much bigger, because it was all about reclaiming that historic ring of life and reclaiming the whole state for the Florida panther.”
Which raises the all-important question: Did she have cubs? Did they film them?
“Here’s a little bit of a spoiler, but yes she had cubs,” Bendick said. “That’s one of the most impactful moments, is when she has kittens. Not only does she have kittens, but they survived the huge hurricane … that comes through. So, there’s a lot of drama, there’s a lot of ups and downs.”
Bendick said they created a trailer with early footage from the first two years and showed it to a mutual friend, Phillip Watson, who works for Appian Way and is tied to DiCaprio’s projects.
“Right after that, he said, ‘When you guys are ready, this looks like something we want to be involved in,” Bendick said. “But it’s a long game. Almost three years later, we brought Appian Way in from that trailer.”
“They were totally on board,” he said. “I think that the presence of P-22 in LA upped the profile of these stories, too. They understood the story; it wasn’t us trying to figure out why this was important. It already was.”
As happened with P-22, it became not only an animal rights story but an Indigenous rights story as well, he said.
“Something that emerged from those conversations with Betty Osceola helped frame these ideas for us that we all play a part in helping or harming, and we would never have understood them in that light without her perspective,” Bendick said.
A clear solution
As with most environmental issues, the main path to getting legislation and other action taken is to raise awareness.
In addition to the theater and digital distribution, the film was screened over four days throughout the Everglades by the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
“Right now, we’re in a place where sharing the film … is probably our number one goal, in the sense of that’s a call to action,” Bendick said. “The second-tier goal is to look at the success of what’s happened in Florida, with the wildlife corridor that allows animals to pass under highways unharmed is pretty remarkable. The panther has now influenced new legislation that’s trying to preserve corridors throughout the state.”
He is hoping the Florida corridor can serve as a model for creating a system of wildlife corridors throughout the nation.
“At a local level, people can think of this in their own backyard, they can think of it in their state, they can talk to their legislators,” he said. “They can basically take what we’ve learned and in their own way and in their own habitats start to map out what would be a whole system of connected wild space.”
“This is not one of those intractable environmental problems that has no clear solution,” he said.
“There actually is a solution and it works, so audiences are left feeling very hopeful, because there is something on the ground that they can turn to.”
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