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In the wild, rarely, and almost only in Southwest Florida. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission puts the population at about 120 to 230 adults, and most of the breeding animals, the females especially, live south of the Caloosahatchee River.
That is the big wild country of Collier County: Big Cypress National Preserve, Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park and the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is closed to the public except for two short trails, both free and open every day from sunrise to sunset: the one-third-mile Panther Trail, a gravel loop that suits wheelchairs and strollers, and the 1.2-mile Leslie M. Duncan Memorial Trail. A grown male weighs 100 to 160 pounds and measures six to seven feet from nose to the tip of the tail.
Collier County. Big Cypress and Big Thicket in Texas were designated the same year, creating a new category in the National Park System: land protected but still open to hunting, to off-road vehicles under permit, and to traditional use by the Miccosukee and the Seminole, who hold permanent rights to occupy and use it.
Open the guide →Miami-Dade County. Congress authorized it in 1934 and it was established in 1947, and it was the first national park created to protect a fragile living system rather than a mountain or a canyon.
Open the guide →Alligators are in fresh and brackish water in all 67 counties, so the question is where you can watch them safely from dry land.
Read the answer →Yes. The Florida black bear is the only bear in the state, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates there are about 4,050 of them.
Read the answer →Yes, and more of them lately. American flamingos were native to Florida, gathering by the hundreds and thousands in the Everglades and Florida Bay, until the feather trade of the late 1800s nearly wiped them out.
About fifty native kinds, and only six of them are venomous: the eastern coral snake, the southern copperhead, the cottonmouth, the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, the timber rattlesnake and the dusky pygmy rattlesnake.
Any beach on the Gulf coast faces west, so the sun goes down into the water the length of that shore.
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