Scientists know him as P-22. He's a mountain lion that lives in Los Angeles — and though his time's almost up, he's now essentially immortal.
He’s animal royalty in the City of Angels; an ambassador for conservation and for the random beauty this megalopolis offers. But P-22 is also a poster boy for something sadder. The mountain lion is thought to be about 12, and nearing the end of his life. He’s an eternal bachelor, cut off from the rest of his species and a symbol of what’s left of LA’s once-incredible ecosystems that are just barely holding on.
Today, the story of the cougar who stole L.A.'s heart. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times enterprise reporter Laura J. Nelson
More reading:
He’s terminally single and getting old. What’s next for P-22, L.A.’s favorite wild bachelor?
A week in the life of P‑22, the big cat who shares Griffith Park with millions of people
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So we hiked in earlier today to a kill site of P-22 // from mid October, we found a young buck that he killed and fed off of.
Gustavo: His name is P-22. He’s a mountain lion….living in Los Angeles. Like, the actual city.
For a Mount lion, the park is fairly small at only eight square miles, so he can be pretty much anywhere.
Gustavo: The big cat is animal royalty in the City of Angels. An ambassador for conservation, for the random beauty this megalopolis offers. And, let’s admit…because mountain lions are cool.
He's doing his usual, mountain lion things. Even in Griffith park with all of LA surrounding him.
Gustavo: But P-22 is also a poster boy for something sadder. He’s thought to be about 12…and nearing the end of his life. He’s an eternal bachelor, cut off from the rest of his species.
What I quickly concluded is he's like, Phew! I made that trip—The 4 0 5 and the 1 0 1? Not doing that again. Bachelor hood. Isn't so bad. And I got plenty of deer here….
Gustavo: He’s a symbol of what’s left of LA’s once-incredible ecosystems…that are just barely holding on…
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Gustavo: I’m Gustavo Arellano. You’re listening to THE TIMES, daily news from the LA Times.
It’s Friday, July 15, 2022.
Gustavo: Today, what P-22’s life can teach Southern California and beyond about how nature and urban areas can evolve…together.
Food and sex. Our mountain lions need the two fundamentals. They gotta have a place to go to have those midnight designations that give us more mountain lions.
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Gustavo: Laura Nelson is an investigative and enterprise reporter for the L.A. Times. Laura, welcome to the Times
Laura: Thanks for having me.
Gustavo: So when outsiders think of Los Angeles, they think of Hollywood or beaches or palm trees or tacos…they’re probably not thinking mountain lions. But this all used to be a different landscape…and some of that’s still around.
Laura: Yeah, that's right. I mean, many people might know that cougars or mountain lions or pumas, depending on what you call them, are native to California. They've been here for much longer than we have. And for the last 20 years or so, the federal government has actually been studying the cougars, the Pumas of Southern California. // They give them radio collars, they try to figure out where they go, what they eat, who they meet. And keep tabs on // how the population is doing as a whole.
Gustavo: // How did we learn about P-22’s existence?
Laura Nelson: So P 22' story really starts, or at least his story that the public knows about -starts with a biologist from the natural history museum in LA.
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Miguel Ordenana: /// Miguel Ordeñana. Wildlife biologist and senior manager of community science at the naturalist museum of Los Angeles county
Laura Nelson: So Miguel is an LA native. He grew up in LA.
Miguel Ordenana: // We lived literally right across the street from the park at the intersection of Los Feliz and Griffith park Boulevard in these big peach pink apartment buildings.
Laura Nelson: /// He spent time in the park as a kid, going to barbecues and walking to the observatory.
Miguel Ordenana: My mom taught me how to play catch in that park, not necessarily like going for nature walks or looking for wildlife.
Laura Nelson: But mostly his relationship with the park was what he saw coming outta the park.
Miguel Ordenana: Like coyotes, skunks possums, raccoons…//
Laura Nelson: His first cat, the family's cat whiskey was eaten by a coyote when he was a kid.
Miguel Ordenana: It was like my Yosemite because I never went to this Western Santa Monica mountains even, which is our local national park, natural recreation area. I never went there. My impression was that, yes, nature's cool. Nature's worth conserving, but nature that's worth conserving doesn't exist here in Los Angeles because none of that is being celebrated in my museum here in LA or at the zoo here in LA. That was my mindset. And so I was either gonna work at a zoo for the rest of my life or somehow find a way to get to Africa.
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Laura Nelson: So he went to USC for his undergrad and then UC Davis for grad school, where he studied urban carnivore research.
Miguel Ordenana: And so I learned how to use camera traps and study urban carnivores. That's where I first learned that Bobcats existed in Southern California. And I was blown away that the animal lived in LA, right under my nose, my entire childhood living in Griffith park... Nature access is not just physical access, but access to that knowledge of local nature.
Laura Nelson: After he graduated from grad school, he moved back to Los Angeles and we pick up his story in 2011, when he started working on a study of Griffith park, funded by a non-profit called friends of Griffith park tasked with protecting the park and all the nature inside it.
Miguel Ordenana: And the question was, is Griffith park an island?
Laura Nelson: And so they put up cameras along the edges of the park.
Miguel Ordenana: /AND/ Also on potential corridors overpass, bridges, and also tunnels that go over under the freeways that surround the park.
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A few months in, we had photos of deer crossing over the 1 0 1 freeway across the Coalinga pass from the Hollywood Bowl area over to the Griffith park side // And so that was great. That was really exciting.
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Laura Nelson: And Miguel goes out on this unseasonably hot day in February in 2012. And he hikes around inside the park to retrieve the cards that have the footage from the cameras that they put up and take a look and see what's on them. And he goes back to his apartment, sits down in his sunroom and he starts scrolling through all the pictures that the remote cameras have taken.
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Miguel Ordenana: Just skimming through it really quickly. Rabbit after rabbit after deer. Getting a little bored at that point. And then all of a sudden this massive puma butt comes across my computer screen.
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Laura Nelson: And mountain lions have these big paws and long thick tails with a black tip. They're very distinctive.
Gustavo: So how did Miguel react to this discovery?
Laura Nelson: Well…
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Miguel Ordenana: I definitely jumped outta my seat. Fumbled for my phone and then ran barefoot to my car, two blocks away to grab my phone frantically called my wife first
Laura Nelson: And at first he couldn't get a hold of anyone. And he's just thinking…
Miguel Ordenana: It seemed like an urban legend, seeing an urban legend, like Bigfoot or La Chupacabra because…It was something that people would talk about often. They would claim that they would see them and send photos of blurry photos. And they were of their dog or a Bobcat or something like that. // But this was like a a crisp image, obviously a Puma.
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Laura Nelson: /And he’s just thinking/ how are people going to respond to this news? Is the Cougar even gonna stay in the park? And is he going to survive? Because Griffith park is not a habitat that's particularly well suited for an apex predator. It's a tiny fraction of the average territory for a mountain line, whi ch can roam up to 200 square miles.//
Miguel Ordenana: There's picnic areas, there's at least two 18 hole golf courses in the park. There's a couple kiddie train rides, pony rides. There's a Greek theater. There's observatory, there's LA zoo. There's all types of use in the park that is eating up even that eight square miles that he has left.//
Laura Nelson: And it's walled in literally on all sides by freeways and by urban development.
Gustavo: So at what point did Miguel or other scientists start calling this mountain lion? P 22. And what does the name mean?
Laura Nelson: So P-22 came from the national park service, which once they were alerted that this Puma was in the area, they sent biologists out to trap him and add him to the study that I mentioned earlier.
Miguel Ordenana: I was just constantly worried, constantly like, he might die. Or he might just leave. And I knew how important this opportunity was.//
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Laura Nelson: So they did a full physical exam to make sure that he was okay and took blood so that they do, they could do some genetic testing and they also gave him a lightweight. Radio collar so that they could learn // he was going, where he was spending his time. And they also gave him the name P 22. And so the P stands for Puma and 22 means that it was the 22nd Cougar that they'd collared in their study.
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Gustavo: Do you think P-21's jealous of all the attention P-22 is getting?
Laura Nelson: If they knew, I'm sure they would be.
Gustavo: I'm sure they do know.
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Gustavo: Coming up after the break, the photo that made P 22 go viral.
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Gustavo: So Laura, once news got out about this mountain lion living in Los Angeles, what was the city's reaction?
Laura Nelson: Well, you know, researchers, scientists were kinda excited. But also they didn't really know how much they could count on the fact that he would stay. I mean, in the early days of his presence in the park, it was assumed that he would move on quickly because the park is so small, they didn't know that it could support an apex predator like a cougar. So I think it was kind of tinged with people didn't wanna get too excited at first, but his story was very interesting // to researchers because genetic testing showed that P-22 had been born or could genetically be traced to the population of cougars that live in the Santa Monica mountains, like out near Malibu and kind of near the 101 where it curves to the west along the coast. // His father was P-1, the very first cougar who was tracked in the study. And he was considered to be like a particularly violent, aggressive, domineering type, like a tough dad situation for this cougar to be in. And so in order for P-22 to have left home, fled his father and gotten all the way to Griffith Park, he probably would've had to cross two freeways: the 405 through the sepulveda pass, which is // famously busy, one of the busiest freeways in the country. And then also the 1 0 1 near the park. So scientists were not sure if P 22 was gonna stick around, but the fact that he even got in there in the first place was really amazing. And then that story really caught on, when the public learned about P-22, which is actually in an LA time story // featuring a photograph by a wildlife photographer who was working on a story in national geographic.
Steve Winter: My name is Steve winter. I'm a photographer And I wanted to get a picture of P-22 the mountain lion with LA in the background. So I came in with remote cameras, cannon and icon DSLRs hooked up to an infrared beam with flashes. So when that cat walks by on the trail, it takes between one and 10 pictures. So it took me 12 months to finally get a picture of the cat with LA in the background and two months more to get to one with the Hollywood sign.
Laura Nelson: And his photo was // added to a photo exhibit at the Annenberg space for photography. And we did a whole piece on it. And it's that iconic image of the mountain lion prowling in front of the Hollywood sign.
Gustavo: Yeah. I remember when that photo came out and I honestly thought it was like a taxidermy exhibit at the natural history museum. And then when I found out or realized that it was real, I'm like, damn trip out, man.
Laura Nelson: Yeah, it's just surreal. Like it, it seems like something that Hollywood // set up and shot. Like it doesn't, it can't possibly be real. And I think the, the beauty of it and // the strangeness of it and the juxtaposition of something so wild and like something so recognizable really ignited the public's interest in mountain lions locally, because although they've been here for a very long time, most people knew very little about them and // Beth Pratt. /Who's the regional executive director in California for the wildlife Federation,
Beth Pratt: My job is to, you know, ensure his plight is recognized.
Laura Nelson: /She/ really saw an opportunity to use P 22 as an education and advocacy tool.
Beth Pratt: You know, I call him the Brad Pit of the Cougar world and he deserves a spread.
Laura Nelson: She talks about him all the time.
MUX IN- Proud to be weird
Laura Nelson: She runs his Facebook page. She started a Twitter account. There's also some fake, like other Twitter accounts that are unsanctioned.//
Gustavo: Yeah I wonder who P 22 endorses for the LA mayor's race.
Laura Nelson: Yeah we gotta stay tuned. //
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Laura Nelson: Scientists have always worn that we're not supposed to an anthropomorphize P 22, but like Beth, who is a scientist has seen that having him speak in his quote unquote own voice, as a way to really draw people into his plight. She talks about his situation from his perspective. And it's launched all these jokes.
Beth Pratt:I'm sure you saw the GP Mountain Lion Tweet a couple days ago, from the red hot chili pepper song under the bridge, they tweeted. “Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner sometimes. I feel like my only friend” is so funny. It's so good. // He's kind of like a classic Angeleno.
Tape: He said, uh, no to the commute and yeah. That's why I think a lot of people, especially Angelenos identify with him, like, Hey, we've all had a romance quashed by the 4 0 5 divide. I mean, who hasn't.
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Gustavo: So P 22 is now a living legend, but he still has // to, live life in all that. So what's been his interactions with the public, like what have been some of the public encounters that have defined the city's view of this mountain lion?
Laura Nelson: Considering that P-22 has been in the park for a decade. We actually don't really see him all that often. There, he pops up from time to time and those occurrences are extremely memorable, but they're usually pretty few and far between. // But he did have a spate of a couple of years in like the mid 20 teens where he was getting up to a lot of hijinks. And that kind of helped catapult him even further into the public. One of the great examples is in 2015, when // a contractor for a private home security firm was brought out to this expensive house in the Hollywood Hills to upgrade the house's security system and opened up the crawlspace and like was face to face with P-22, who was living underneath the building.
Gustavo: Oh my god. Oh boy.
Laura Nelson: Yeah, it was a media circus. And then the following year, actually less than a year later, a koala disappeared from the LA zoo, which is in Griffith park. So shares territory with the mountain lion and the koala disappeared. The Koala whose name is Killarney disappeared on the night that P 22 had been seen on camera footage in the area
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Laura Nelson: the zoo's actually quite philosophical about it.
Beth Pratt: At that moment, the, the zoo//breathe// had every right to either get a permit to, to either kill or remove P 22. // In the other state, he would've been killed or removed Um, And they didn't. The zoo apologized? You said our bad, our fences weren't high enough..
Laura Nelson: // It's like, they couldn't ever definitively say that it was P 22, but evidence made it pretty clear that there's only like a handful of predators that would be able to do what he did, including leaping over an eight foot fence that's topped with barbed wire…
Gustavo: oh, circle circle of life.
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Laura Nelson: Yeah, so it was pretty clear. I'd say it's incriminating evidence.
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Gustavo: More after the break
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BREAK 2
Gustavo: Laura, as awesome and as hyped up as P-22 is, he's also a metaphor for his species and also about what we humans have done to nature.
Laura Nelson: Yeah, that's right. Especially // freeway development in Southern California, which has been the thing that has primarily // fenced off different populations of mountain lions and made it harder and harder for them to meet with each other. And so with their territory shrinking and the gene pool shrinking the species in Southern California are really having a hard time. // Recent scientific modeling has found that within about 50 years, if there's not significant intervention, the puma that live in the Santa Monica mountains and in the Santa Anna mountains could be extinct because of genetic abnormalities.
Gustavo: You mean inbreeding?
Laura Nelson: Yes, there's really bad inbreeding going on in the Southern California mountain lion population. Some people have said that it is similar to what was going on with the Florida Panthers in the 1990s. // They were so inbred // that they were developing genetic abnormalities, including sterility and were not able to have new kittens to // keep the species going. The species, they face a tough road as California gets more and more developed and there is less and less wilderness, they don't have a lot of places to go.
Gustavo: Yeah. You always hear these stories of these mountain lion getting poisoned or mountain lions getting hit by cars or killed. And it seems like they're all relatives of P-22.
Laura Nelson: Yeah, that's right. The population here is very closely related. The three main causes of death for cougars in Southern California are other cougars. So if you were a young male were to come across an aggressive territorial older male, they could fight and one could kill the other. But then the two other leading causes of death are manmade rat poison, and freeway traffic. // There's no way for these animals to know whether they're eating. a raccoon or a coyote that has eaten something that has eaten rat poison, and it // decimates their system. It's a very sad state of affairs. And freesays, of course, we see news stories all the time about mountain lions being hit and killed on roadways in Southern California. There's been a spate of them just in the last couple of months.
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Laura Nelson: The mountain lion, P 54, who was struck and killed on Las virgins road in the Santa Monica mountains. Just this month. // Her son was struck an d killed on the 4 0 5 freeway in April. And her parent was also killed by a car several years ago. So // it's like intergenerational // fatality from cougars trying to cross freeways, which cut off their territory and isolate them in these very small spaces. They're not built to, to live in conditions like that. ///
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Gustavo: And yet, despite all this modernity, cougars continue! they're actually part of the fabric of this landscape of Southern California, despite all the development.
Laura Nelson: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's really surreal to see. I'm sure everyone has seen footage either of P 22 or another mountain lion, just like walking through, built out neighborhoods. And that's one of the things that P 22 really captured the public's attention by doing earlier this year, when he wandered into silver lake for the first time.
P22 Twitter Video: That's crawling around while I could be walking. /// Oh, it has a tracker on it. What? Ooh, send that to me.//
Laura Nelson: // And there was footage of him like walking down the sidewalk, using the sidewalk. Walking between parked cars and people's yards slinking in and out under street lights.
Corrie Mattie: Dude, dude, you're huge. //
Laura Nelson: And he also pops up from time to time on like ring doorbell cameras, and other smart doorbell software. And it's just strange to see them. I mean, there's been other Puma across Southern California that have been seen in shopping centers. Um there was one that went into a hair salon. They just pop up from time to time. And it's a reminder // that this place is still Wilder than we think it is.
Gustavo: Yeah, the other great mountain wildlife companion that Southern California has is coyotes and the natives of this region and across the Southwest, they respected them. But coyotes have never gotten that modern day love that P-22 has. So what was it about a mountain lion that captured the public's imagination?
Laura Nelson: First of all // I think they're just a lot rarer, so it's inherently more interesting and it's, they're apex predators, so they're // sexy and scary. And P 22, I will say, even in the Pantheon of mountain lions is like extremely good looking. He's quite photogenic. He's got these markings around his eyes that make it look like he's wearing eyeliner. And he has these kind of slashes on his cheeks that look like // makeup contouring. Like he just, he's very good looking. And he seems to like, know his angles and how to pose for the cameras. // And then of course, there's this kind of. Steady drumbeat of sightings of him in neighborhoods, especially in this, the kind of expensive hilly neighborhood that surround Griffith park, like near the Cahuenga pass and in Los Feliz and the Hollywood Hills. // There's all these memes that have been made about him. There's like merchandise lines. And I think so that, and a certain. At a certain point kind of feeds itself. Like the more stories you hear about P 22, the more likely people are to say that they've seen him or be interested in seeing him. And it's really just turned him into probably the most famous animal in California, maybe in, in the country.
Gustavo: But has all this attention led to anything more than just more attention?
Laura Nelson: It has, there's a couple things. And of course, P-22 // is not aware of any of this, but…
Gustavo: That's what you keep saying, but you gotta give him credit.
Laura Nelson: He's // he really doesn't// like the spotlight, like he, he really tries to stay away from humans as much as he can. And especially in dark places, like one of the reasons why he goes through certain neighborhoods is because there's fewer streetlights there. // But there's kind of two efforts that he's really been attached to. The first is this wildlife crossing, which is basically a bridge over the freeway for animals that's being built in Agora Hills.
Tape: I think one of my favorite P-22 selfies I've taken is with Congressman Adam Schiff. He's also a big P-22 fan. Come on up.
Laura Nelson: And it's designed to help the inbreeding problem with cougars that we talked about by uniting the population in the Santa Monica mountains with the population in the Santa Susanna pass helping them bridge the freeway and hopefully start to breed with each other and address some of the inbreeding genetic abnormality issues. And that's a 90 million dollar project that has been discussed for a really long time. But until people started learning about P-22 and his plight that he is cut off by freeways from the rest of his species, that he is unable to find a mate that he will die alone, a Virgin really twang the public's heartstrings and that kind of helped the advocates building this project, jumpstart their fundraising efforts.
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Miguel Ordenana: That's what made this bridge in reality, to be honest, Is his story and all the hard work of all these advocates of course, but definitely his story, um, grabbed the tension that was needed
Laura Nelson: And then the other effort started from one of his lowest moments. Also in 2015, right around the time that he was found in the crawlspace in Los Feliz, there was a photo released of him by the national park service that showed that he was really sick, you could tell his kind of fur was matted and his eyes were really blurry. It was very sad. And he had eaten something that had ingested, rat poison, which, an anticoagulant that affects the blood. And that goes all the way up the food chain from the smallest animal that eats the poison through every other animal that then eats that animal all the way up to the top of the foodchain— cougars. And the national park service had to specially trap him and treat him, which they almost never do. They gave him vitamin K injections and some other treatments to help him recover from a parasitic infection that he developed after he ate the rat poison. And that image went viral. I'm sure many people remember seeing it. // It Kind of looks like a DUI mugshot of a celebrity um, and it helps spur action in the California legislature and ultimately led to a law that took effect in 2020 that bans some types of rat poison from use in California.
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Laura Nelson: So he, for an animal who can't speak for himself, has like a number // of accomplishments under his belt. That more than a lot of humans,
Miguel Ordenana: That's what all these campaigns to ban rap poison, to improve connectivity and, and change housing ordinances. And all that is coming from is because people really want a better future for wildlife and human wildlife coexistence. And I think that is his legacy.
Gustavo: Finally, Laura is P-22 going to be around to see the benefits of the changes that he has helped inspire.
Laura Nelson: Probably not. P\-22, they think, is about 12 years old. They think he was about 18 months old to two years when he showed up in Griffith Park. And that was 10 years ago this year. // So mountain lions in the wild generally live to be 10 to 12. /// Scientists think it's possible that he might live longer because he isn't confronted with other mountain lions who might fight him and kill him. So one of the major sources of fatality is off the table, he can't live forever.
Miguel Ordenana: Trom an animal standpoint, usually a measure of success is having offspring and having my kind of parallel journey being in my late twenties when I discovered 'em now being in my late thirties, I've gotten married since then. I've had kids that's basically, um, what keeps reminding me of like how sad kind of his ending is
Gustavo: And when he does pass away, did Miguel tell you what he's gonna do when that day happens.
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Laura Nelson: Scientists who've been studying P-22 are planning for his eventual demise. He's now the oldest living mountain lion in the federal study. So they know it's only a matter of time. They will most likely discover that he's died If he goes immobile for 12 hours the radio tracking collar that he wears will send out what's called a mortality signal just to show that he's not moved.
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Laura Nelson: Miguel has told me that he hopes P 22 goes peacefully. And isn't hit by a car and isn't killed by another mountain lion.
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Miguel Ordenana: it really kind of connects me the first time I saw him in person, which was when he was first captured. And to see him. um, laying in the grass in this brown grass. And even though he no other mountain lion has been in this ecosystem for decades, blend in so perfectly to this ecosystem , it made me feel. Really grateful for his presence to be there. And I feel like for his ending, I just would like love to see him just kind of just go to a remote canyon in the park, um, and take a rest and pass away.
Gustavo: Laura, thank you
Laura Nelson: Thanks for having me.
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Gustavo: And that’s it for this episode of THE TIMES, daily news from the LA Times.
rowan moore gerety was the jefe on this episode, Jazmin Aguilera scored it and Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Brousalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Madalyn Amato and Carlos De Loera. Our intern is Surya Hendry. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera and Shani Hilton. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
Say something funny about poochie and P-22?
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back next week, with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.
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