The calendar said Jan. 17, 1983. Chris Belden and his panther-capture team — two biologists, two trackers and a pack of hunting dogs — were searching for FP3. Florida Panther 3, as she was formally known, was the third of only eight documented big cats in the state.
Today’s quest took them into the rutted logging trails and thick brambles of the Fakahatchee Strand, also known as the Fak, a swampy state preserve east of Naples. Their goal was to tranquilize FP3 and replace the batteries in her tracking collar.
At about 11 a.m., the team’s dogs treed the 70-pound female in a 30-foot-tall oak. Nobody had a clear shot from the ground, so one of the hunters took a tranquilizer gun and climbed the tree. When he got about 18 feet off the ground, he took aim and fired. The dart went into the back side of the panther’s right hind leg, and the drug took effect in four minutes.
As they lowered the cat down with a rope, “blood was dripping from her nose,” Belden later wrote in a report. Once on the ground, they discovered “she was no longer breathing and there was no pulse.”
Two team members tried reviving the animal with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, like a lifeguard with a drowning victim. They huffed and puffed, but to no avail.
