Last Monday afternoon, while crouched in a crawl space beneath a house in the posh Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, a home-security technician came face to face with a hundred-and-fifty-pound mountain lion. Terrified, the man ran upstairs to alert the homeowners; by that evening, a scrum of news trucks and reporters had gathered at the scene, and state wildlife officials were trying to flush the male lion out—first by poking him with a long pole, then by launching tennis balls and beanbags in his direction. The lion stayed put through the hubbub, but by daybreak on Tuesday he was gone.
This particular mountain lion is no stranger to Angelenos. Three years ago, in early 2012, he left his home in the Santa Monica Mountains, crossed two eight-lane freeways, and, after travelling at least twenty miles, dead-ended in Griffith Park, a former ostrich farm that is now one of the country’s largest municipal green spaces. Biologists tranquilized the lion and fitted him with a radio collar; he became popularly known by his tag number, P-22. Though he stayed almost entirely out of sight—one remote-camera video showed him hiding in the brush while an early-morning jogger passed by, unaware and unmolested—his fame mushroomed. Steve Winter, a National Geographic photographer, waited fourteen months to capture a shot of P-22 prowling below the Hollywood sign. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library hung P-22-themed ornaments on one of its Christmas trees. Inevitably, P-22 also acquired a Twitter handle, through which he complains about traffic and asks for restaurant recommendations.
P-22 is not the only mountain lion in greater Los Angeles. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile patchwork of parks, preserves, and private land where P-22 was born, is home to about ten adult cats, and an estimated twenty more live on the southern edge of the city, in the Santa Ana Mountains. But freeways have progressively isolated and dissected these urban populations, leading to what Alison Hewitt, a U.C.L.A. publicist, has rather breathlessly called “a web of rivalry, slaughter, and incest.” In battles for scarce space and resources, lions in the Santa Monicas have killed their relatives and former mates. Two lions have mated with their daughters. When Seth Riley, a biologist who has studied the Santa Monica population for fifteen years, worked with geneticists to construct a lion family tree, its tangled branches resembled the bloodlines of European royals. Although these lions do not yet display the symptoms of inbreeding—kinked tails, cowlicked fur, heart problems, and low sperm counts—Riley expects that future generations will.
What the lions of the Los Angeles Basin need is new blood, but the man-made barriers around them make immigration unlikely. P-22 was not the first Southern California mountain lion to attempt a freeway crossing, but he is among the very few to have survived one, much less two: in the Santa Monicas and adjoining mountain ranges, twelve mountain lions have been killed by traffic in the past dozen years. During one month last winter, three lion cubs were crushed on freeways. “Sometimes it seems like we’re mostly studying how mountain lions die,” Winston Vickers, a wildlife veterinarian who has tracked lions in the Santa Anas since the early two-thousands, told me. “I’ve seen way, way too many dead lions.”
Before P-22 appeared in Griffith Park, many Angelenos knew that mountain lions lived near the city—they had heard occasional stories of back-yard sightings, vanished pets, large tracks in the dust—but the animals were, for the most part, a ghostly presence on the urban margins. P-22 gave his species shape, turning its uncertain future in the basin into an object of public discussion. For years, area biologists had called for wildlife crossings that would allow lions and other animals to move safely and interbreed. P-22, along with his fervent fan base, lent new support to the cause.
Highway departments in North America and Europe have been building wildlife overpasses, underpasses, and tunnels since the nineteen-fifties, for species ranging from hedgehogs and crabs to elk and grizzly bears. The largest and best-studied wildlife crossings, a set of forty-four underpasses and overpasses along the four-lane Trans-Canada Highway in Alberta’s Banff National Park, are used frequently by bears, wolves, moose, and other large mammals; the bears, at least, appear to cross them in search of mates. The most promising location for the first mountain-lion crossing in the Los Angeles Basin would span ten busy lanes of traffic, and it is by no means guaranteed to deliver the genetic variation that the lions need. Yet the project has momentum. Beth Pratt, an energetic campaigner for the National Wildlife Federation, has won support from congressional representatives and local governments for a crossing in the Santa Monicas, and earlier this year the California State Coastal Conservancy awarded a million-dollar grant to the department of transportation for the design and permitting of the crossing, with the goal of beginning construction by 2018.
Ecologists are often surprised by animals’ ability to adapt, and even evolve, in city environments. Over time, in some urban areas, spiders have gotten bigger, salmon have gotten smaller, and birds have changed their songs in order to find their mates. European bears and wolves, which have lived near humans for centuries, have acquired different diets and habits than their wilder North American cousins. Marina Alberti, a professor of urban design at the University of Washington, in Seattle, has described cities as “hybrid ecosystems” where nature is both destabilized by and reacting to human influence. They aren’t wild in the traditional sense, but neither are they zoos: they are living systems, evolving under our feet. Though a highway crossing in the Santa Monicas may seem like an expensive indulgence—a multimillion-dollar construction project for cats?—it offers a means to preserve part of the altered but vibrant hybrid ecosystem that is Los Angeles.
Still, the proposed crossing isn’t likely to change the outlook for P-22. After his brief detour into Los Feliz, he returned to the seven square miles of Griffith Park, where he is likely to continue subsisting on about three deer a month, along with the chance coyote or raccoon. Now in middle age, he is not expected either to return to the Santa Monicas or to venture northeast, across more freeways, to the San Gabriel Mountains. Though P-22 could be relocated, biologists say that he is safer in the park; mountain lions are extremely territorial, and moving one onto an established population’s turf is risky. P-22, it appears, will live out his solitary days within the Los Angeles city limits, trapped by his adoring public.
