Swamp Screamer: At Large with the Florida Panther

In Swamp Screamer, Charles Fergus tracks the fifty or so panthers that survive in Florida and the wildlife biologists who are trying doggedly to save them. These experts devise high-tech “captive breeding” strategies in the hope of making the panthers increase and multiply. In the course of their work, they rub shoulders with all sorts of colorful characters – sportsmen, developers, theme-park owners, radical animal lovers – who see the panther as a threat to their own enterprises or as a rallying point for their activism. Swamp Screamer is an account of the complex scientific and political efforts that preoccupy the wildlife movement today; it is also a history of the vanishing wilds of Florida, and an affecting portrait of the panthers themselves.