One June 6, 2008, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Panther Capture Team member Mark Lotz wrote the following summary of kitten births in 2008 at the request of Friends executive director Tom Murray:

"I've been dealing with several depredation investigations (3 in the past week with several follow ups on one of them) and FP158 denning in Collier State Park. I've only been in the office a total of 3 hours in the past 9 days. I am a field biologist, after all (sometimes the "field" aspect is more prevalent than others). FP158 has chosen an old ag field that's grown up in Brazilian pepper and is impossible to move through. This is one of the most difficult dens I've ever worked. She's only left once during the day so far. We searched for 6 hours on Tuesday and found nothing. Getting an accurate location on her is the difficult part because you can't move around to get in a position to get adequate locations.

FP151, 3/4/08, 1 male, 1 female, Big Cypress National Preserve

FP140, 5/20/08, 2 males, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge

FP 162, 5/23/08, 1 male, 1 female, Big Cypress National Preserve
(these were discovered dead in their den).

So the net total of kittens produced by radio collared females is 4.

Don't forget, we only have collars on about 1/5 of the population so there are plenty of uncolored females producing babies. And, since it takes about 1.5 years to raise a baby, females only have kittens every 2 years. So we might alternate between "high" years and "low years" in the radio collared sample. Alternately, since you were concerned about the discrepancy between births and deaths and the appearance that the population was in decline, keep in mind that we find all roadkills because they are easy to spot and report. Most of these are uncollared animals. That’s what we call bias.

You're trying to compare radiocollared birth rates to collared and uncollared death rates. To make a fair comparison you'd have to only look at radiocollared deaths compared to radiocollared births. If you did that you'd see that there have been four radiocollared deaths this year (FP127, FP157, FP131, and FP138) to match the four kitten births. If you saw my article in Wild Cat News a couple of issues back you'd see that the number of roadkills has mirrored the population trend. So in a weird way a lot of roadkills are "good" because it indicates a large population. Obviously roadkills aren't good, but I hope you understand the point I'm trying to make."The day after writing this memo, Mark found himself once again crawling on his stomach in thick Brazilian pepper plants and fighting off mosquitoes for 45 minutes trying to reach FP158's den in Collier Seminole State Park. The great news is that he found 3 boys and a girl. So the current count is: 3 surviving litters 6 males 2 females.