It’s taken me 20 years to get this photo.

That’s how long I’ve been a photographer interested in natural Florida. And this is the first time I’ve seen a panther in the wild with a camera in my hand.

I have trekked more than 2,000 miles through Florida’s wildest places to bring attention to the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a statewide network of public and private lands that keeps wild Florida connected for wide-ranging wildlife.

For the past two years I have been focused on the endangered Florida panther—the last big cat in the eastern United States and a subspecies of cougar. Today, there are approximately 200 panthers—up from just 30 in the early 1990s—surviving primarily in the Everglades