Deep in the cypress swamps of South Florida, a custom-built camera trap clicks to life in the dark. A Florida panther — sleek, golden, and almost mythic in its rarity — pads silently into frame. For a fleeting moment, an animal that once teetered on the edge of extinction reveals itself to a lens patient enough to wait years for the encounter. That image, and thousands like it, has become the heartbeat of a movement.
That movement is Path of the Panther, the Emmy Award-winning documentary and conservation initiative produced by Grizzly Creek Films and Wildpath. Founded in 2023 and based in Tampa, Wildpath was built on a single, animating belief: that a well-told story is the most direct route to a person's willingness to protect something wild.
A State Growing Faster Than Its Wild Places Can Survive
Florida gains nearly 1,000 new residents every day. Every three years, another million people arrive — and with them, more subdivisions, more highways, and less room for the species that have called this land home for millennia. For the Florida panther, listed among the very first species on the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1973, the math has long been merciless. Vehicle collisions now claim roughly 30 panthers each year, the single leading cause of death for the species.
And yet, the story is not one of loss. From a low of just 30 adults, the panther population has clawed its way back to nearly 200. Scientists say true recovery requires three separate populations of 240 or more breeding individuals — a goal that depends entirely on a connected ribbon of habitat stretching the length of the state: the Florida Wildlife Corridor.
From Moonshot to Movement
What began as an ambitious photographic mission led by National Geographic Explorer and eighth-generation Floridian Carlton Ward Jr., director Eric Bendick, and impact producer Tori Linder has become one of the most effective conservation storytelling efforts in the country. Wildpath is uniquely positioned for this work — a team that has spent years embedded in the swamps, ranchlands, and forests of Florida, building trust with cattle ranchers, veterinarians, and Indigenous communities on the front lines of conservation.
The results speak for themselves. The team's storytelling helped catalyze the bipartisan, unanimous passage of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act in 2021 and has been tied to nearly $2 billion in combined state and federal conservation investment. Today, the Florida panther is the only big cat in the eastern United States actively expanding its range — a quiet but extraordinary signal of what's possible when the right story finds the right audience.
The Next Frontier: Classrooms Across Florida
With the J.W. Couch Foundation serving as anchor funder, Wildpath is launching the statewide educational distribution of Path of the Panther — bringing the film, along with a comprehensive suite of interdisciplinary curriculum developed in partnership with National Geographic educators, into schools, nature centers, and community organizations across Florida.
The vision is ambitious and clear: protect nearly one million additional acres within the Florida Wildlife Corridor by the end of the decade, help Florida reach 30% protected status by 2030, and build a model that can be replicated as a national network of wildlife corridors.
A Shared Belief in the Power of Story
The partnership between Wildpath and the J.W. Couch Foundation came through a referral from The Nature Conservancy — a closing of a circle that felt almost inevitable. The foundation's own film, The Paper Bear, follows Florida black bears through the biodiversity of Northwest Florida with the same conviction that animates Path of the Panther: that wild animals can be a lens through which we see, and ultimately protect, something much larger.
One Story, One Corridor, One Classroom at a Time
Florida still holds an ancient, wild landscape capable of harboring a big cat. That is no small inheritance. With this grant, Wildpath will ensure the next generation of Floridians grows up knowing what's at stake — and what's still possible. The path forward runs through the corridor, through the classroom, and through every child who learns to recognize the panther as part of who they are. The work is only beginning, and the future is finally beginning to look wild again.
