[music] - Florida's a lot of different things.

[music] It's buggy and it's wet.

It's challenging terrain, but it's a really special.

[music] - It's fun to be able to just go out and wander and get lost.

I think the connections to the landscape.

[music] It's a different way of knowing.

[music] Florida is wild.

That's what it is.

[music] We have irreplaceable plants, places and people.

- My family, they lived off of the land.

I want to introduce my daughter to this place.

This is where your family used to live and breathe and survive.

[music] - We camped here years ago.

We stood, you know, 100ft away and were throwing rocks into this fire, like for hours.

[laughter] 100 days really gives you a lot of time to know each other well.

Just every day I felt like I'm the luckiest person in the world.

- More than a decade ago, a passionate trio of Floridians set out to discover whether wildlife could still traverse the Florida they knew was changing.

- We're now in the headquarters of St.

Johns River.

Day 55 of the expedition.

Pretty awesome.

- This is the land that God gave to us to to take care of, and we still have a chance to help and keep it patched together.

- Every time you come here, you leave a little bit with a heavy heart and that you're watching, you know, Florida changing before your very eyes.

- Throughout their thousand mile journey, the trekkers sounded the alarm and called for the protection of an 18 million acre corridor of connected habitat for wildlife and humans alike.

[music] - Two.

One.

[music] - Ever since, it's been a race to preserve wild Florida and following in their footsteps for new trekkers, were about to explore their patch of the corridor.

- So.

- Should I just act handed?

[music] - Not anymore.

- Pentonville is a jokester.

He's our quiet sneak.

[music] He's got a wealth of knowledge of these lands, their history.

- I'm a native Floridian.

Seventh generation.

[music] So the stranded expedition is a 60 ish mile journey from Big Cypress going to the Caloosahatchee.

- My name is Em Kless.

I am currently the interpretation supervisor at Naples Botanical Garden.

- Em is very much our wildflower, very much a free spirit.

- Are we all the way around?

Yeah, I got Laura.

Oh, great.

- They are infatuated with nature.

- Orchids have like a character to them.

Some of them look like they're like sticking their little tongues out.

They're like.

- Uh.

- They're just cool.

- My name is Laura Foht.

I am a mother who made the whole trip worthwhile.

I also am a teacher and a naturalist, and I care very deeply about people and places.

I thought you knew that part.

[laughter] Laura Foht is the most beautiful.

Um, Mother Earth come alive?

Which track was your favorite that you saw today?

- Oh, those little panther tracks.

- Yeah, the playful panther.

- I am Ryan Young.

I moved to Florida when I was 17.

Not by my own choice.

I said this is a swamp.

Mosquitoes and toothy reptiles.

How am I ever gonna do the things I love to do outside?

And quickly discovered that I was very wrong?

- No.

Ryan is so much fun.

He is our track leader, the fearless jolly rancher carrier.

Which one?

Uh, green.

- Green.

You're on the green train.

- I am, I can't.

It's the hair I don't know, seeping into the brain.

I got a blue.

- I'm blue.

It saved my life.

Jolly ranchers save lives.

[laughter] - Guys, look, look look, look.

- Oh oh.

Oh.

- Wow.

- One time I was in some real shallow water and there was a gator.

Didn't see until the nose of my kayak was right over his head and that would be scary.

[music] Here in Southwest Florida, a patchwork of public and private land makes life possible for wildlife.

But that's changing because Florida is the fastest growing state in the country.

In a blink wild spaces are transformed to rooftops and roadways.

[music] This area was slotted to be one of the largest subdivisions on earth.

They built half of it.

Golden Gate Estates just north of us, and this was going to be the southern Golden Gate Estates.

- And throughout the United States spanned other impressive landmarks of man's ingenuity.

- So over many years, they built hundreds of miles of roads, four gigantic canals to try to drain the landscape.

People were buying plots of land in the dry season and coming back to find their lot underwater.

Then, in a bipartisan act of Congress, the planned development became the Picayune Strand State Forest, part of the Everglades Restoration Project.

One of the largest in the world.

The land was taken back, taking out all the roads, regrading landscape and plugging up the four canals that run through this area to restore that natural sheep flow.

When you fix the water, everything comes back.

- Oh my God.

- Gator babies!

Whoa!

Those are tiny.

Those are brand new.

- They're so baby.

- And now it's one of the great success stories of restoration in southwest Florida.

[music] But a truly wild Florida depends on a connected habitat that gives wildlife room to roam.

- Hiking with a little bit of silence amongst a group of trekkers with the wind blowing in the pines.

[music] That's where you really start to realize, okay, there's a lot going on out here.

- And while animals are masters at keeping a low profile, we knew there was someone who could give us a sense of just how much wildlife is using these spaces.

- Okay, so we'll get this guy out.

I might need a little persuasion here to get this guy.

The case is a little experience and rusted.

- When's the last time you checked this?

- Um, about a month ago.

- Williams lens provided a rare window into Florida's remaining wild.

[music] - All right, who wants to click?

[music] Two males.

- I think that'd be you.

- Answer the question?

[laughter] That's the other.

Actually, yes.

Let's just see what we got here on this one.

- Look how good.

- Male or female?

- Female.

- Why do you say female?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- All right.

You guys can tell it's a kitten because of spots.

You know, it's obviously smaller.

[music] This is really amazing stuff.

Not only because it's bears and bears and panthers, but this could have been sold to development.

But FWC, the state came in and said no, that's protect us.

[music] - Seeing how free they are out here.

[music] It's just this like unbridled joy that we get to watch them experience and knowing the stakes makes it so much more important and beautiful to see.

- Yeah, and it's hard.

We lose an average of 22 Panthers a year to vehicle traffic.

That's, you know, a population of about 200.

That's a big percentage.

[music] - Resting on her shoulder.

I was cleaning her shoes.

- We were about to get a taste of what it's like for an animal moving through this built up section of the corridor, and it's going to be a little bit different than what we've been doing this whole time.

We're going to be traveling some busier roads with every car that rush past.

We were reminded of the power that development has to write the ending for so much of Florida's wildlife.

- People were obviously in a hurry to get to where they needed to go.

They weren't slowing down for us.

[music] - I can't imagine mama panther having to try to get through that area with a baby like it would be nearly impossible.

- Wildlife needs connected habitats and ways to reach them.

And much like us, they need those places that always feel safe.

- Welcome.

Good to see you all.

Okay, so welcome to Cork Street.

This is an exciting day.

We'll be going through the backcountry.

[music] - Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary is at risk of being cut off completely from nearby patches of wild in a sea of both real and proposed development.

It could become an island.

[music] - You never know what you're going to see as you go around each corner or look at each branch.

It's always a special place when you get to an old growth forest.

[music] - The vast number of birds, and the number of like gators that we came across.

That was pretty special.

♪ Running wild, feeling oh so free ♪ [music] ♪ Trying to light the night up with the fire ♪ [laughter] - Has like a.

[music] Spike.

So it is going to bloom.

That's a little bloom.

Spike right there you found so cool.

It'll get much longer than that.

Yeah, with all the development pressure going on around it.

Um, this is a safe haven for a lot of things.

[music] - And this place could have looked very different if it weren't for the passion of local citizens.

- Back in the early 50s, a lot of logging was going on in the Big Cypress and Fakahatchee and the local citizens were like, hey, this is the last forest remaining.

We need to find someone to help us protect it.

- The Audubon Society became the ally.

They were looking for.

- By December of that year, in 1954, we had protected the first 5000 acres of what has now become swamp sanctuary.

- So the sanctuary really is a community effort, right?

It is.

They saw the value and they.

- Right.

- Incredible.

[music] - Oh my gosh.

[laughter] - I think that as adults, sometimes we take things a little bit too seriously.

And so it's fun to be able to just go out and dance in the rain.

- There are so many lessons and gifts in natural spaces.

It's so important to not only to receive them and absorb them, but then also to carry them forward and give them back.

[music] [music] - If protected lands are the fabric of the corridor.

Something has to thread them together.

- When do you start growing tomatoes?

Here.

- So in this location here.

We'll start between February and March.

[music] Once we finish with the crop, everything gets dissed back into the ground and it stays fallow.

- When it isn't growing season, farmers can let water flow and provide a seasonal home for something else.

- In essence, there's a restoration of of of the wildlife.

- Do you ever picture a scenario where this is developed in any sort of way?

- I don't.

It's our intention to always be out here.

Generation to generation, farming this ground.

- They're feeding people and they've been doing it for a long time.

And so the fact that they can do that and they can be sort of like symbiotic with the stuff directly to the east, like a cypress strand.

That's pretty cool.

- I could crawl right out of my mind.

- In this way.

Private and working lands weave together the corridor, providing wildlife safe passage between larger patches of protected wild land.

[music] ♪ But it ♪ ♪ Feels like ♪ [music] ♪ It's a new day ♪ ♪ Now, we can make it shine ♪ [music] - As we trekked across private lands.

We found out just how critical they could be.

[music] Middle of nowhere.

- Can we slow down, Alex?

- No freaking way.

- I can't.

- Believe it.

- Alex.

Let's get closer.

- Off in the distance, I saw something, and I knew right away it was.

There it is.

There she is.

[music] And we all freaked out.

- Doesn't seem.

- Real.

Oh my.

- God.

- All right, well, you are.

- I spotted it first.

- Thirty second to a minute we're watching this thing.

[music] And it just being.

[music] - There are only about 200 Panthers left in Florida.

It's one thing to know they're there, but it's an entirely different thing to witness one.

- The energy that that moment encapsulated is something that we will always share.

Do you like it.

- Coming at you from the corridor it's Em.

♪ Listen to ♪ ♪ My heart ♪ ♪ Feeling strong like a disco ♪ - Florida's private lands are vital to the success of the corridor, but they're under growing pressure with a thousand people moving to the state every day.

These lands are increasingly at risk.

The citrus industry offers a glimpse of what's at stake over the past 20 years.

Disease has devastated Florida's citrus production, cutting it by 75% and more than doubling the cost of production when citrus farms fail.

The land, which is often stewarded by the same families for generations, becomes even more vulnerable to development.

[music] - Even in the distance that you've trekked.

There are at least three other large scale developments that you know are really going to change that western edge.

- As a mother, imagining a mother panther trying to traverse those sections with kittens just is really, really hard for me to think about.

[music] - It's been difficult.

You know, you're seeing another development happen and it just kind of gut punches you.

[music] - Well, the thing is, it's especially down here in Southwest Florida, it's all still here.

Animals that have been here for millennia and they are still here, like against the odds.

This wildness is still here.

And that is so encouraging.

And yes, it it chipped away at but it like it's still here.

[music] - People thought the Caloosahatchee River was a barrier to Panther spreading north.

But in the last few years, panthers have shown that while the river may be an obstacle, it's not impassable.

But our built environment will be if we allow it.

- Um.

[music] - We made it, guys!

- Woo hoo!

- There's no stopping development.

People need places to live.

But I think the biggest thing is, can the two things development and the corridor coincide?

And it should.

[music] - If we allow development to get in between wildlife spaces.

I don't think there's a way to quantify what we would lose.

[music] - Having a safe place to be able to go out and explore with my family.

Is it safe if we don't have those connections?

[music] - Oh yeah.

- The mama panther having a home for her baby is at stake if we don't have those connections, everything is at stake.

[music] - I haven't, like, cried much in my life, but I really cried for the first time when when Kenzie was born.

You've got someone to protect and take care of.

The Florida I want for my daughter is one that is planned carefully.

- I think of Wildlife Corridor as the last great hope for communities to remain intact.

[music] This is that moment in time that they'll look back on and they'll say, we did the right thing.

[music]