Off-road dispute centers on Florida panthers

He has bushwhacked through knee-high saw grass and saffron-colored love vine in search of the predator's milieu. But winds across the fields must be easterly, or planes headed to the Fort Lauderdale airport will chase the big cats into the remotest corners of the preserve.

"There it is!" proclaims Schwartz, a Sierra Club outing leader from Broward County, his victorious tone tempered by the long search. "You can tell it's a panther because it's so much bigger than anything else that shape."

Schwartz's voice comes in relative silence, in an area of the preserve known as Bear Island. Off-season rainstorms have halted blasting at the limestone mines 10 miles away, and off-road vehicle access to the area has been suspended for four months.

The edict against ORV use is only a pause while the trails are stabilized with gravel. It was the temporary nature of the suspension -- and the fact that the trail work will essentially make the ORV roads permanent -- that led to a lawsuit by conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, in November. They allege that ORV access to the sensitive area constitutes federal neglect of the National Park Service's obligation to protect the highly endangered panthers.

The environmental groups -- also including Defenders of Wildlife and the National Parks Conservation Assn. -- sued the park service for reopening the northwest corner of the preserve to ORVs a year ago, contending that the rigs have churned up delicate ground cover and altered water flows in the protected wetlands.

About 20 miles of newly carved ORV tracks in the northwestern Bear Island Unit of the preserve are in dispute, but the activists note that the wide swaths of herringbone-print gouges cut across the most important terrain for the panther.

"The basic feeling is that, with 23,000 miles of trails [throughout the preserve], that we can afford to close 20 to 30 miles to make sure the panthers are not adversely affected," Jonathan Lovvorn, attorney for the Humane Society of the United States, says of conservationists' push to ban ORVs from Bear Island.

"I don't think we need to find a panther with ORV tracks across his back to know this is having an effect."