By now you’re no doubt familiar with the life story of P-22, the Hollywood mountain lion who’s made a home for himself in Griffith Park. After being born somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains, the young prince – his father was P-1, the first king of the Santa Monicas – spent his earliest years learning...
As a kid, Beth Pratt-Bergstrom watched nature shows like “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” and tasted the salt spray off Cape Cod with her father at the helm of their skiff. So when she came to California to fulfill her dream as a naturalist, she went straight to Yosemite National Park to see bears. And to the...
by Louis Sahagun of the LA Times As 101 Freeway traffic streaked past, a dozen conservationists and fundraisers gathered this week just west of Liberty Canyon Road in Agoura Hills, their eyes alternating between maps they carried and the contours of a canyon where mountain lions hunt and breed. But it wasn’t the big cats...
Photo Credit: National Park Service [Editor’s note: This commentary is prompted by a rancher’s move to kill one of the Santa Monica Mountains’ beleaguered mountain lions after one or more of those lions killed ten alpacas and a goat. As we published this piece, the owner of the unfortunate livestock was reportedly negotiating an alternative,...
Photo Credit: National Park Service Hollywood would be hard-pressed to conjure up such a misunderstood beast. There are about a dozen pumas (Puma concolor) living in the Santa Monica mountain range, which bisects Los Angeles. These big cats are stuck on an island of habitat, trapped on all sides by freeways on which hundreds of...
Photo Credit: Jeff Burrell – Wildlife Conservation Society Why did the black bear cross the road? Actually, it didn’t—because it didn’t have to. A motion-activated camera shows that the bear in question took an overpass—essentially a large, camouflaged arch—that gracefully carves over U.S. Highway 93 in Montana, just north of the town of Evaro at the...
Photo Credit: National Park Service It was drizzling and gray, late fall, on the old Rickards Movie Ranch, high in the Santa Monica Mountains, in rural, red-state western Malibu. Bleached skulls were tacked to the outside wall of a stage-set saloon; rusting wagon wheels leaned at angles. A hand-painted sign announced a “Public Hanging, 5PM.”...
The Cat That Changed America, directed and produced by Tony Lee, is making its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival! The film tells the story of P-22–and the quest to build the wildlife crossing at Liberty Canyon–and has a cast that includes many #SaveLACougars team members! Showtimes, followed by a Q&A, are as...
Photo Credit: National Park Service Planning has started on the largest wildlife crossing in the world. The privately-funded bridge would allow the endangered Santa Monica mountain lion and other species to dodge safely the insanity of LA traffic. The Ventura Freeway, known to locals as the 101, is a relentlessly busy east-west road that carries...
We made a difference! Last week, the community worked together and helped build a low-cost, effective livestock enclosure for the local rancher whose alpaca were likely killed by P-45 as an alternative to acting on the depredation permit, which ended the imminent threat to P-45’s life. As one of the few males in the region,...
