Ghost sightings are becoming increasingly common in southwest Florida. Sometimes hunters’ remote camera traps will catch grainy grayish images at night. The subjects’ eyes have a spectral glow from the reflection of the camera’s infrared light. Live daytime sightings are usually brief: a quick glimpse before the ethereal figure vanishes into the dense underbrush of palmettos.

These ghosts—endangered Florida panthers—are real. That they exist at all is a near miracle, as the large cats almost vanished in the 1970s, when scientists estimated there were maybe 20 Florida panthers still surviving in the wild. With intensive human intervention, the panther population is estimated to have grown tenfold over the past 40 years, but they are still extremely rare animals.

Cliff Coleman regularly finds evidence of panthers passing through Black Boar Ranch, an 1,800-acre private hunting property he manages in the interior of southwestern Florida near the city of LaBelle. Last year, Coleman was clearing debris from a hurricane when he discovered fresh signs of a male panther. A leaning palm tree’s trunk was shredded like a gigantic cat’s scratching post, and next to it, pine needles were wadded into softball-sized mounds on the ground. “The males will bunch up the pine needles and then urinate on them to mark their scent here,” he says. It’s a warning sign to other males in the area and a welcome mat to potential mates.

The panthers don’t stay long on the ranch, says Coleman. They easily hop the 8-foot-tall fences, kill some game in the hunting preserve, eat and then disappear. The males each roam overlapping territories of about 200 square miles. When two meet, they will fight—often until one is dead. Females stay closer to their birthplaces, roaming about 50 square miles.

That’s a lot of territory to keep relatively wild in a state where 900 new residents arrive every day. With so many people streaming in, says Wendy Mathews, TNC’s conservation projects manager for Florida, development is starting to push inland. Farms, ranches and forests that the panthers and other wildlife need are being turned into neighborhoods and roads.

If they are ever going to recover, Florida panthers will need more protected habitat, and plenty of it. To get the Florida panther off the federal Endangered Species List, the state and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) must help the animals reestablish three independent breeding populations, each consisting of 240 cats.

That’s why TNC worked with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to buy a conservation easement on the Black Boar Ranch in 2015, as well as on the next two properties to the north. It’s part of a decades-long collaboration among government agencies and nonprofit groups to preserve a contiguous swath of undeveloped land—a conservation corridor—so the animals can expand their range and increase their numbers.