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,...
Photo Credit: Clark Stevens – RCDSMM The mountain lion blamed for a recent mass slaughter of alpacas may have dodged a bullet. But a rancher’s reprieve for the P-45 cougar believed to have torn apart 11 alpacas and a goat last weekend drew international attention to the greater plight of the big cats in the Santa Monica...
Photo Credit: Steve Winter – National Geographic This week, the most prominent local mammal wearing a radio tracking collar isn’t P-22, Southern California’s most famous mountain lion, it’s Beth Pratt-Bergstrom. The California director of the National Wildlife Federation is participating in a three-and-a-half day, 50-mile hike that follows the cougar’s journey from the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park....
Photo Credit: Steve Winter – National Geographic Her killer walked right in. It was March 3, 2016, a cool spring morning, when Killarney, the oldest of the Los Angeles Zoo’s 11 koalas, was discovered missing. A search party quickly fanned out, hoping for the best. The 14-year-old koala was known for wandering her enclosure at...
