The new puma will have big paw prints to fill if it decides to make its famous predecessor’s range its own. People in Los Angeles are thrilled to have another mountain lion prowling the Hollywood Hills.
When the mountain lion known as P-22 died in late 2022, people in Los Angeles were so distraught they painted murals of him on building facades, buried him after a indigenous tribal funeral and even held a festival in his honor.
The famous feline had already been the subject of books, documentaries and an iconic photograph by National Geographic’s Steve Winter. The image showed P-22 in mid-stride, perfectly centered in a small pool of light beneath the Hollywood sign in the hills of Los Angeles at night. It was a natural symbol of wildlife adapting and surviving.
The love for P-22 wasn’t only based on the incredible fact that a mountain lion had established his “range” in Griffith Park, an oasis of wilderness surrounded by urban landscapes. The puma had to cross Interstate 405 and Route 101, heavy-traffic highways that are famously lethal to his species, to get there. For the next decade he skillfully avoided cars and trucks as he went about his business, popping up on trail cameras or in the backyards of Los Angelinos.
Now there’s a potential successor to the vacant throne.
The new puma isn’t collared and wildlife experts don’t know where it came from, but like P-22 it had to cross several dangerous highways to reach the city.
It’s not clear yet if the mountain lion is male or female. Jeff Sikitch, a biologist with the National Parks Service who is part of an ongoing, decades-long study of pumas, told the Los Angeles Times that he thinks the cat is likely a young male, but there’s not much to go on so far except for witness sightings and a low-resolution video taken by a man who lives in an apartment building near the edge of Griffith Park.
“Will this cat be as skilled as P-22 was at avoiding cars for a decade?” the National Wildlife Federation’s Beth Pratt told the BBC. “We don’t know what’s going to happen here.”
The only images of the newcomer so far are grainy video stills, but Griffith Park itself has trail cameras that are used to monitor wildlife. Credit: Vladimir Polumiskov
For now, wildlife officials are waiting and watching to see if the potential puma successor puts down roots in P-22’s old hunting grounds or tries to make the dangerous trek out of the city.
If the new puma decides to stay, it will enjoy plentiful deer and a benefit most members of its species do not have — a local population that understands mountain lion attacks are extraordinarily rare, and will support them by giving them a wide berth.
On the other hand, despite the 4,000 acres of Griffith Park and the residential neighborhoods below, the cat’s inherited range would be much smaller than what’s typical for the species. Like humans cramming belongings into apartments, pumas sacrifice space when they live in or around cities.
Suzanne Pye, a local who admired P-22 from afar, said she welcomes the newcomer and isn’t worried about attacks on people. The presence of a mountain lion after almost 18 months without one prowling the hills, she said, will add “a frisson of excitement to the morning hikes.”
A close-up of P-22 in 2019, when he was briefly captured for a health check-up. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The kittens died “foaming at the mouth, throwing up bright green.” Acts of vigilantism against cats are happening more frequently as junk science about their hunting habits spreads via news reports.
Cat rescuer Erica Messina was trapping stray kittens to get them out of the cold and into homes before winter, hoping the young cats would have better lives.
Instead, they died horribly shortly after she successfully trapped them from a lakeside colony in October.
“All of the 13 kittens that I had all passed the same way,” Messina told KBTV, a Fox affiliate in Beaumont, Texas. “They were foaming at the mouth, they were throwing up bright green and peeing bright green.”
Two weeks later, per KBTV, a dozen adult cats from the same colony died the same way the kittens did, “some with chemical burns on their noses.”
“I was upset. I was at work when I found out and I came out here and started asking people, you know, what the problem was,” Messina told the station. “I got no answers.”
Like others who have cared for large colonies of strays who were killed by overzealous birders, Messina says she now has PTSD as she’s trying to save the lives of the remaining cats. She’s managed to catch all but four of them with the help of other local cat lovers and rescue organizations.
They’re getting no help from the authorities. Police referred Messina to Beaumont Animal Care, who told her they can’t help unless she can prove the cats were intentionally harmed. Not only are they putting the burden of proof on the victims in this case, but the victims can’t speak for themselves.
‘A bird-watcher’s paradise’
The colony lived in Collier’s Ferry Park, a lakeside park that also borders marshes where migratory birds spend time alongside native species. Indeed, Beaumont, a coastal Texas city of 115,000, markets itself, and Collier’s Ferry Park in particular, as a prime bird-watching spot.
Collier’s Ferry Park in Beaumont, Texas, where 25 cats were killed in an alleged poisoning. Credit: National Parks Service
A 2013 story in the local newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise, detailed how local officials and business owners were promoting the park as a bird-watching paradise, noting that “[b]irders in particular are a lucrative market” driving tourism in the city. The story explains how the park is ideal for birds and those who like to watch them, details prized species found there — including herons, the least grebe and cinnamon teal — and includes input from a zoologist with a focus on birds, along with a local businessman who leads guided bird tours on the lake.
Collier’s Ferry Park is also listed on a site for “birding hotspots” while Texas Monthly calls it “one of the country’s best bird-watching spots.”
It is precisely the sort of place misguided bird watchers, driven to rage by widespread junk science blaming cats for declines in bird population, tend to dispense what they believe is vigilante justice. It stretches credulity to imagine anyone but a self-styled conservationist who blames cats for bird extinctions would risk a criminal conviction to poison a colony of cats, especially in a well-known hotspot for bird watchers.
Junk science blames cats for declining bird populations
We’ve written our share about the disingenuous and agenda-driven activism that passes for research, most of it published by Peter Marra, a Georgetown avian ecologist who also authored the book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences Of A Cuddly Killer. The book advocates a “war” on cats and says they must be extirpated “by any means necessary” to protect birds and small mammals.
It does not, notably, put the blame on human activity, including but not limited to habitat destruction, the widespread use of harmful pesticides, wind farms, sky scrapers and all the other man-made structures, chemicals and machines that have contributed to a 70 percent decline in wildlife in the last 50 years.
But don’t take our word for it. Vox Felina calls Marra “a post-truth pioneer” who has claimed cats “kill more birds than actually exist,” while Alley Cat Allies echoes our own criticism by pointing out that Marra’s studies are composites of “a variety of unrelated, older studies” which his team uses to concoct “a highly speculative conclusion that suits the researchers’ seemingly desperate anti-cat agenda.”
“This speculative research is highly dangerous—it is being used by opponents of outdoor cats and Trap-Neuter-Return (including the authors) to further an agenda to kill more cats and roll back
decades of progress on TNR. And it is being spread unchecked by the media.”
In an NPR piece criticizing the studies blaming cats, Barbara J. King shares many of our own criticisms, chiefly that Marra and company have done no original research, relying instead on older studies, most of which have nothing to do with feline predatory habits, and none of which actually measure bird deaths from cats. King also notes, as we have, that it’s impossible to arrive at anything resembling a precise figure for feline ecological impact when Marra et al admit they don’t know how many free-ranging cats there are in the US, offering a uselessly wide estimated of between 20 and 120 million.
She also points out that the research team conducted “statistical perturbations” to massage the data into something fitting their agenda, which is activism, not science.
The researchers are guilty of “violating basic tenets of scientific reasoning when making their claims about outdoor cats,” bioethicist and research scientist William Lynn wrote.
“Advocates of a war against cats have carved out a predetermined conclusion,” Lynn noted, “then backfilled their assertions by cherry picking an accumulation of case studies.”
The war on cats
Across the world, people are using these studies and those of Marra’s acolytes to justify cruel cat-culling programs, like the recently-canceled cat hunt that would have rewarded children for shooting felines in New Zealand, and Australia’s widely-condemned mass culling that used poisoned sausages to kill millions of cats.
Stories of stray and feral cat poisonings in the US abound. Here at PITB we wrote a series of stories exposing how a government biologist in California took it upon himself to hunt cats under the cover of night, killing them with a shotgun and later celebrating in emails to colleagues, calling the dead cats’ bodies “party favors.”
Indeed, one of Marra’s own proteges, Nico Arcilla — formerly Nico Dauphine — went vigilante. Arcilla, who shares author credits with Marra on studies claiming free-ranging cats kill billions of birds, was a working for the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., when she was convicted in 2011 of attempted animal cruelty. The managers of a local colony, suspicious after strange substances began appearing in the feeders they’d set up for the strays, set up cameras which caught Arcilla placing poison on the food left out for the cats.
Back in Beaumont, Texas, a familiar story plays out: people who manage cat colonies out of love for the animals are working with local rescues, pooling together limited resources to save the remaining strays and hoping for justice.
“It’s terrible, you know? There are some people that just hate cats,” said Vyki Derrick, president of local rescue Friends of Ferals. “The rescuers have been trying to pull them out of the colony and it’s just sad that people want to interfere with that when the problem, ‘problem’ is being taken care of.”
“The camera never lies,” the old saying goes, but it turns out that’s not quite true.
During my crime reporting days I wrote an unusual story about a guy who’d been picked up on armed robbery charges. The suspect’s face was visible, the security camera footage was unusually sharp, and the suspect himself had a previous armed robbery conviction from years earlier.
It looked like an open and shut case.
There was just one problem: The man had an airtight alibi. He had half a dozen people willing to go on record saying he was at a party 70 miles away when the robbery happened, as well as ATM receipts showing he’d withdrawn cash that night far from the site of the robbery. When he retained a lawyer, the attorney was able to show his cell phone records placed him at the party, and forensic videography showed the man in the armed robbery footage, despite bearing a striking resemblance to the suspect, was taller and moved differently.
In the end the police dropped their case and found the real robber, but I never forgot the story, nor my conversations with forensics experts who explained how something as simple as taking measurements at a crime scene, from the same angle and using the same cameras, could prove a case of mistaken identity. Things like gait, observing the dominant hand and other body language also factor heavily.
One forensics expert told me it’s like watching the replay in a baseball game: You can be absolutely sure a runner is out by watching footage from one angle, but footage of the same slide from another angle can clearly prove the runner’s foot made contact with the base before the fielder’s glove tagged him.
That kind of attention to detail is what helped Thomas Keller rule out the possibility that a mountain lion was roaming the fields of Lower Macungie Township in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Pennsylvania state police issued a warning to people in the area that “a large feline was seen in the fields” near a residential road.
Keller, a furbearer biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, headed down to the area earlier today and found the exact spot where a local homeowner had photographed the supposedly wild cat. Using a life-size cut-out of a puma, which he placed carefully where the cat was standing, and a camera placed at the same height and angle used in the original photograph, Keller proved the cat in the photo was much smaller than a puma.
“It’s just a house cat,” Keller said flatly after producing his own photos of the spot.
The original photo, left, and Keller with his scale cut-out of a mountain lion, right. Keller says the cat in the photo is probably a large, well-fed stray.
Like the forensic videographer who helped clear a man of a robbery charge, Keller was able to disprove the immediate conclusions of people who saw the image. He says the work is important because “there’s a lot of fear and panic that can spread.”
“We will generally go out and try to talk with who reported it and get perspective on where the photo was taken,” Keller told the Lehigh Valley News. “We look at original picture and measure what we can … We look at things in the picture that we can get scale from. It might look like a mountain lion, but we need to know what those measurements are to get the scale.”
Confusion over what the camera shows is compounded by the optical effects of zoom, which can throw off the observer’s sense of scale, he told The Morning Call, a local newspaper. He said people who aren’t sure what they’re looking at should call their state game commissions, or comparable offices, to get help from experts.
As for Pennsylvania, while there have been historical reports of mountain lions, most were decades ago and the handful that panned out were cases in which the large felines escaped from private captivity or traveling circuses.
Although it’s not unheard of for pumas to migrate east, they’re no longer extant in the region and sightings of the elusive cats are almost always cases of mistaken identity when people see bobcats or large housecats.
“There’s none,” Keller said. “We get hundreds of these reports every year and we haven’t been able to substantiate one yet.”
Pain In The Bud 