Flamingo Gardens has taken in a 22-week-old puma kitten named Sabal, who will live permanently at the Davie, Florida, botanical garden’s Everglades Wildlife Sanctuary.
Sabal came from a facility in Georgia that could not provide for her long-term care. She is not releasable, which is the condition most of the sanctuary’s residents share.
A cougar, not a Florida panther
The sanctuary has been careful about this distinction, and it is worth repeating. Sabal is a western cougar, Puma concolor. The Florida panther is a subspecies, Puma concolor coryi, and is federally listed as endangered.
The same animal carries different names in different places: puma, panther, cougar, mountain lion. Sabal is the species; she is not the Florida subspecies.
Florida’s wild panthers are down to a population that state biologists count in the low hundreds, and the ones that need help tend to arrive young: Naples Zoo took in an orphaned panther kitten weighing under three pounds in 2026, the sixth panther it has treated for the state wildlife commission.
What Sabal can do is stand in for them. Visitors who come to see a large tawny cat in a South Florida habitat are the audience for the story of what has happened to the ones still living in the wild, which is mostly a story about habitat loss and the roads that cut through what is left.
Seeing her
Sabal went on public view on January 17, 2026, with a viewing window of 10 to 11 a.m. daily while she finishes acclimating. Flamingo Gardens has said the hour is subject to weather and to Sabal’s own willingness to be seen, and posts updates on its website and social channels.
Flamingo Gardens was founded in 1927 and covers 60 acres in Davie. It combines a botanical garden with a wildlife sanctuary for native Florida species that cannot be returned to the wild.
