In southwest Florida, man and panther vie over goats and state's true nature

NAPLES — Arturo Freyre lives among the lions.

It's not the Florida he or hundreds of other nervous Collier County residents ever imagined. Florida is supposed to be about shopping centers, golf courses, theme parks and watching pelicans at the beach. Cardinals are pretty and welcome, but tree frogs are noisy unless you turn up the air conditioning.

Five years ago, Freyre and his wife retired to a spacious patch of southwest Florida that borders wilderness teeming with animals that make the couple think twice about nighttime walks — bears, coyotes, snakes.

And panthers, those sleek nocturnal hunters that Freyre calls "lions."

Freyre, 77, knows the panthers lurk in those woods because he wakes regularly to find that sometime in the night some beast has dragged off another one of his goats.

August was a bad month. A big cat was using his yard like a Taco Bell.

Freyre called Mark Lotz, the panther sleuth. He ought to have him on speed dial.

• • •

Lotz, whose last name happens to rhyme with "goats," is a panther biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In the winter, he helps catch the endangered species to fit them with radio collars that track their every movement.

When he isn't catching panthers, Lotz patiently coaches a growing number of Floridians about how to live with the rising population of lions in their midst. For many, the panther is the wild heart of Florida. Remove it and Florida is gone. Others would be happy to see the cats removed from the neighborhood, if not the wild entirely.

Freyre, a New Jersey resident for most of his life, is a member of the latter group.

He lives in Golden Gate Estates, a development that was born as a real estate swindle in the 1960s to trick Yankees into buying swampland. The state eventually bought back the dampest acreage and turned it into a state forest. The dry part, north of Alligator Alley, became home to the Freyres and 22,000 other people.

The 4-square-mile development is suburban yet wild to the extreme. Glittery Naples lies to the west. The Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, the Fakahatchee Strand, Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park are just east. Just around the corner from Freyre's homestead is a Walgreens and a Hungry Howie's.

And so, apparently, are the panthers. They're 7 feet long from nose to tail and can weigh as much as 150 pounds. They normally eat deer, opossums, small alligators and hogs. But they don't shy away from gift chickens and unprotected herds of domestic livestock.

"Cat food,'' Lotz says.

• • •

Lotz is 44, divorced, quiet, athletic and funny. During panther-catching season he is often the biologist tapped to climb the tree where a tranquilized panther might have fallen asleep. His job is to secure the panther by rope and lower it gently to the ground. He is the only known Floridian to have been injured by a panther: During one exciting capture a panther fell from a tree onto his knee, resulting in surgery.

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"Are panthers dangerous?'' he is often asked.

Lotz has been trained not to sugar-coat his answer. Mountain lions, the close panther relative, have attacked and killed hikers in Colorado and California. It has never happened in Florida.

"But that doesn't mean it couldn't,'' Lotz says.

In the 19th century, the panthers wandered almost to Texas. Feared by settlers, they were often shot on sight.

They steadily vanished from their multistate range and by 1980, scientists weren't confident that panthers existed anymore. But a tracker hired by the state found them. Government agencies bought wilderness land to protect habitat.

Panthers had been isolated in southwest Florida for so long they suffered from birth defects that threatened to doom them anyway. In 1991, biologists released a few Texas cougars into South Florida so they could refresh the gene pool. Afterward, the cougars were removed. The panther population has since climbed from about a dozen feeble animals to more than 150 healthy ones.

All the while their habitat has continued to shrink, giving way to golf courses, shopping malls and subdivisions. Looking for new wild land, some young male panthers have roamed into Georgia. But more have headed west into Golden Gate Estates, where kids ride bicycles, climb monkey bars and play soccer. And home­owners sometimes claim tax exemptions by raising a few goats or chickens in the back yard.

In 2005, nobody in southwest Florida reported losing any livestock, according to a government report. In the year that ended June 2013, panthers killed 25 goats, cows, lambs and house cats.

• • •

Arturo Freyre's telephone rang at 6:30 a.m. recently. It was a neighbor telling him that two of his goats were running in a panic down the street.

He had lost four goats the previous week and had spent a lot of time with Mark Lotz, who had even set up motion-sensitive cameras around the property.

Freyre shook a can of goat food in the direction of his pasture. That usually brings them running. Two came. Two didn't.

He made the usual call.

"Mr. Lotz, I know you probably don't want to hear from me again, but . . ."

Lotz headed over. He knew he would be little comfort to a man bewildered about what it sometimes means to live in Florida. Freyre came from Cuba in 1948 to learn how to fly airplanes. He enjoyed a long career in commercial aviation and lived in a place with sensible buildings and no lions. These days he looks at the world through the prism of Fox News. "I loved America when it was America,'' he said.

"I don't understand why you environmentalists don't just move the panthers to public land,'' he told Lotz. "That would solve the problem.''

Lotz explained that panthers, bears, bobcats and alligators come and go. A decade ago, biologists relocated a panther. That night the panther trotted 30 miles back to its favorite chicken coop. It's better, Lotz says, to protect your livestock. Then the panther will move on.

When he retired to Florida in 2009, Freyre built his house, planted squash, raised chickens and got himself a dozen goats to qualify for his tax write-off. With money from a wildlife organization intended to help livestock owners cope with panther and bear predation, he actually started building a shelter. But he never quite finished it — there are a few gaps in the fence.

"Anyway, I'm an old man,'' he said. "It's very hard for me to round up my goats and get them into the shelter.''

• • •

Lotz is no Sherlock Holmes. But he is pretty good.

He followed a turkey vulture's circling shadow into the woods and then tracked a foul scent to a fly-covered goat killed last week.

His real target were the goats that had disappeared the night before. Now Lotz crept through thickets of ferns and palmettos. He inched through tall grass like a golfer looking for a lost Titleist. He stopped. Pointed at grass lying at an angle as if something large had been dragged across.

He found the goat 10 feet away, below the branches of a Brazilian pepper. Freyre backed away in horror. "A lion must have done this!'' he yelled.

Lotz described the attack: Springing, the cat had grabbed the 80-pound goat's flanks with its powerful claws, then reached under with its massive jaws to clamp shut the wind pipe. The goat died from suffocation.

"Oh, my God,'' Freyre cried.

They're not his pets, he said, but he really enjoys having them around. His young niece in New Orleans loves them — she has given them names like Bambi.

Lotz never found the second goat. Perhaps the panther had buried it for a later dinner. Perhaps the panther was in the vicinity guarding its kill.

"Are we in any danger?'' asked Freyre.

• • •

One last chore. Mark Lotz collected the memory cards from the four cameras in the woods. At Freyre's picnic table he popped them into his laptop.

An image appeared — the nose of something brown sniffing the camera lens.

"Is that one of those mountain lions from Texas that are in the wild?'' Freyre wanted to know.

Lotz avoided sighing. It's a common question. If the animals now wandering southwest Florida are Texas cougars, goes the logic, they aren't panthers and therefore deserve no protection. They can be moved or killed.

"No,'' Lotz said. "It's a Florida panther. Anyway, Texas cougars and Florida panthers mated centuries ago.''

"Are you sure that's not a mountain lion? It must be 200 pounds. Maybe bigger.''

"No, the largest panther we've ever caught was 154 pounds. This is a young male. About 100 pounds.''

Unconvinced, Freyre removed his straw hat and held it in front of stomach like a shield.

"What am I going to tell my niece?'' he asked. "I can't tell her that Bambi is dead.''

Contact Jeff Klinkenberg at (727) 893-8727 or jklinkenberg@tampabay.com. Follow @JeffKlinkenberg.