Wednesday, February 08, 2017

A week in the life of P‑22, the big cat who shares Griffith Park with millions of people

The lion slinks through the chaparral, a blur of movement in the night. Head held lower than his shoulders, he scours the brush in a ravine just south of Travel Town in Griffith Park. Hind paws land where the forepaws lift. No twig snaps, no crinkling leaf. He’s silent, an ambush predator, always hunting, always looking for opportunity. Inside a small gray box on his neck, a microprocessor switches on to calculate and time stamp his location — 21:00, Dec. 2, 2016 — one of 56 readings made in the course of a week. The coordinates reveal the lion’s rambling course through this island of wilderness in the midst of the city. As famous as he is, the mountain lion known as P-22 is a mystery, his day-to-day life hidden by his instincts for evasion. The National Wildlife Federation has called the species a “nearly perfect predator,” and among the survival skills, fine-tuned over 40 million years of evolution, is a talent for invisibility. What evolution did not prepare P-22 for is how to exist in an eight-square-mile urban park with more than 5 million human visitors a year. Most male cats have almost 20 times that space, nearly to themselves...more

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