99% Invisible - 516- Cougar Town

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Wildlife and urban development don’t usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It restricts their movements and makes it harder for them to find food or a mate. But biologists and urban planners have started working together –- crafting a plan to try to help pumas move more safely around the city. And in the process this one cat, dubbed P-22, has turned into something of a celebrity—the symbol of a movement to redesign our cities and make the built environment more friendly to animals.Cougar Town

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Back in February of 2012, Miguel Ordinana went on a hike in Los Angeles' famous Griffith Park. The trail he took led him to a hill that looks out over the Hollywood Bowl and the Ford Amphitheater. It was one of my favorite spots to collect data from because I would get these really beautiful photos of animals because that is beautiful view of the sky and LA. Miguel is a wildlife biologist who studies animals inside the city of Los Angeles.

As a kid, he and his mom lived in a duplex in Los Felis on the south side of Griffith Park. That's producer Roxandra Guidi. On his hike, Miguel walked through canyons of dark green chaparral, collecting footage from a set of motion-activated trail cameras. He used the trail cams as part of his research for the U.S. Forest Service, monitoring the animals that called the park home. When he got back to his office, Miguel started sorting through the images. Usually what my brain kind of gets used to is it's like seeing a bunch of like empty photos because grass often triggers my camera or a bunch of deer and rabbit

photos. Every now and then his cameras would pick up other animals too like coyotes. Maybe even a gray fox if I'm lucky because I just learned that gray foxes were in the park as well. But this time around, he didn't see any coyotes or foxes. Instead, he saw something even more extraordinary. All of a sudden I get this big puma butt on my computer screen and I'm just blown away.

I literally jump out of my seat. A puma butt. I'm in shock and it's, I even go back a few photos and come back to it just to kind of refresh my eyes to make sure it's not a great day because often people will walk their dogs in front of my camera and that's a big animal. But this was obviously a puma, which is also commonly called a cougar or a mountain lion. It had a shiny coat of sandy brown fur, muscular legs, huge furry paws. And there's also even this little black marking, which is left by males as scent marking residue that only males produce. So not only did I

know as a mountain lion, but we would have confirmed that it was a male, just by this butt photo. Mountain lions are classified as a specially protected species, not quite endangered but close. There are somewhere between 2000 and 6,000 of them spread across the foothills and mountains of California. But here was a mountain lion, an municipal park that's used by thousands of people every day,

in one of the largest, most congested cities in the country. This was like finding bigfoot. This was like finding, let you put gawdara or some sort of urban legend like that. As he stared at the Puma's butt on his computer screen, Miguel couldn't help but wonder, how on earth did this mountain line end up here where did he come from how did he get there what's going to happen next what's going to happen to this mountain line is he going to try and escape and get back off there was a good chance something like that could happen across the state traffic accidents are the leading

cost of mountain lion death and yet somehow this one had miraculously survived the track across LA's busiest highways. Researchers say it's the first documented case of a cougar making it this far into the urban core without getting run over and killed, but now he was effectively stuck, surrounded on all sides by an ocean of freeways and crowded neighborhoods. Wildlife and urban development don't usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It restricts their movements and makes it harder for them to find food or a mate. However, in the years since Miguel first discovered Griffith Park's mountain

lion, biologists and urban planners have started working together, crafting a plan to try to help Puma's move more safely around the city. And in the process, this one cat has turned into something of a celebrity, the symbol of a movement to redesign our cities and make the built environment more friendly to animals. Hi, hi, hi, hi. animals. I met up with Miguel this past winter on the edge of Griffith Park. A decade later, the mountain lion still calls this place home, and he has a name now,

P-22. It's catchy, I like it. Super catchy. P-22 stands for Puma No. 22. It was given to him by the National Park Service, which for the past 20 years has been tracking more than 100 other mountain lions across Southern California. Just after Miguel's discovery, the park service captured and tagged P-22 with a GPS collar. By following his movements, they've been able to get a better sense of his health, the

size of his territory and his ability to reproduce. They did matches genetics with a male that they studied, who is his dad, P1, which is dance for Puma 1, and he was the first Puma ever studied by the National Park Service. And he was a vicious individual like the big one of the biggest. For years, P22's dad, P1, was the dominant male cougar in the Santa Monica Mountains. He fathered litters of cubs with the female mountain lions who roamed his territory. But when he couldn't find a mate, he started mating with his offspring. Load genetic diversity is a problem among all mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains.

P1 was also fiercely territorial. When his cubs started taking up a lot of his space, he started killing his offspring. It's possible that P22 survived his father's wrath by making this unlikely journey to Griffith Park. So, I know basically it's favorite. Hangouts and pots, which are trails, funnels, canyons, intersections and trails. Please, when you see scat tracks or these other signs called scrapes

where they like kick through the back feet like this, we might see some up there. Miguel is kicking up the dirt gently with his feet so I can try to picture these scrapes. And now I'm looking for signs of a cougar on our trail, checking the ground for Scott. There's a part of me that wants to see P22, but a bigger part does not.

He blends in so well, so quiet and silent. Yeah. That he just can be right over there. But even if he is right over there, he's likely to stay hidden in the park's deep canyons and caves. Mountain lions may come off us ferocious in our imaginations, but in reality they're actually pretty timid. They're not like the big cast like leopards and African lions and jaguars.

They're a little bit more bold and fierce. They're a little bit like your cat that is a little bit like a security cat basically. In the last decade, there's been no evidence of other mountain lions coming into P22's territory, partly because they too would have to survive the treacherous journey from the Santa Monica Mountains across Interstate 405 and Highway 101. But also because Griffith Park is small, the typical range of a male mountain lion is 150 square miles, but P22 has only nine square miles to work with. And that's a problem, because if P-22 wants to find a mate, he'd have to retrace his steps,

facing busy freeways and neighborhoods or stepping into another cubers territory. Do you know if he's attempted to leave the park and go back to the Santa Monica Mountains? No, but he... well, I don't know what he was thinking, but one time he actually crossed Barham Boulevard, which is ordering us with universal. That's universal studios. Apparently someone so P-22 literally crossing the street and reported it. But anyway, he crossed over it. When actually in the bath lot, when they do the tram tours and all that, and spent the night, and didn't like what he experienced,

that he crossed right back, and he hasn't left every single. Wow. P22 has actually left Griffith Park a number of times. He's been spotted roaming around the Hollywood Hills and some other well-to-do neighborhoods surrounding the park. In fact, he's become something of a local celebrity. Angelina knows love to track his whereabouts.

Nearby residents like hearing about sightings of P-22 and believe he may have ventured out of Griff the park because of the heat. I found him drinking from a sprinkler head that was kind of dripping down onto the sidewalk. Experts who track and study P- Even Stitcher's own VP of content and our show's boss, Colin Anderson, had his own one-in with LA's favorite mountain lion. I looked up and P22 was about 10 feet away from me

and one thing I was really aware of was that I was wearing sandals. And I was like, this isn't optimal. My shorts and my sandals, like, not dressed for a mountain lion confrontation. Still, at the end of his adventures, P-22 always ends up coming back to Griffith Park. From one of the peaks in Griffith Park, about 1,600 feet,

you can get a lay of the surrounding land. To the south, the Los Felis and Silver Lake neighborhoods with sleek palm trees in the distance, to the east is the concrete channel of the LA River, which runs along Interstate 5, one of the busiest freeways in California. Into the north and west is the famous Hollywood sign, and another highway, the 101, which runs all the way out to the coast. From up here, you can see that P-22 really is marooned on this island. But it wasn't always like that. The hills of Griffith Park are part of the

Santa Monica mountain range. It's just that developments and major roadways have chewed up large swaths of land. People build to absolute maximum and then think about wildlife, think about the repercussions later. The island effect isn't some natural occurrence. It's the result of a series of decisions made over decades. A recent study found that if urban development

continues as it has, mountain lions could disappear in Southern California within the next 50 years. The demise of such an important apex predator would have a downstream effect on the entire ecosystem. For me, P-22, like for a lot of people, was an entry into not just socially changing my thinking, but scientifically.

Like, I just had really not been exposed to the science of connectivity. Beth Pratt is the California Regional Executive Director for the National Wildlife Federation. She's a big fan of P-22. He even has a tattoo of the Mountain Lions face on her shoulder. Around the time P-22 was discovered, Beth came to LA to research her book when mountain lions are neighbors. She met up with a Puma expert from the National Park Service who took her around town.

We drove around the Santa Monica Mountains and he's pointing out these freeways and talking about the other cats that live there. And I was like, wow, this is, you know, this is a probably like, and it also kind of me this is fixable. Beth thought there must be a way to restitch the landscape to make sure no other mountain land would have to cross multiple freeways in order to roam and find a mate. She spoke with other wildlife experts about the problem, but no one had a concrete solution.

I knew they needed something to help with connectivity. Was it a tunnel? Was it sensing? Was it an overpass? Beth and her colleagues weren't going to turn sprawling Southern California into a safe mountain lion habitat, all at once, but they needed to start somewhere. So she joined forces without a local wildlife organizations

and launched a campaign called Save a Lake Uggers. The group planned to race awareness and do more research on the local mountain line population, but their main goal was to build a massive. First of its kind, urban wildlife crossing. Wildlife crossings are physical structures that help animals safely navigate human-made barriers like highways. Often, they're both in places where roadways cut through dense forests and

other open land. Crossings have been shown to both reduce animal vehicle crashes and relink territories that different species call home. They typically come in the form of an underpass or an overpass and have been used widely in Europe for decades. More recently, they've started taking off in North America, in Canada's Banff National Park, a network of wildlife crossings are used every day by bears, wolves, mues, elk, and, yes, mountain lions, proving that a thoughtfully designed crossing in places where species tend to migrate can benefit humans and wildlife. However, a wildlife overpass in a megacity like Los Angeles had never been done before.

Politicians in particular were skeptical, not just about the utility of an urban wildlife crossing, but its price tag. This would be the biggest and most expensive crossing in the world, spanning 10 lanes of highway. The California Department of Transportation had tried to get federal funding for a project like this three times in the past and failed. Initially, even Beth struggled to sell the idea

of a wildlife crossing to her higher ups. I had a boss when I started it, who I presented, and they were like, what's a wildlife crossing? What does that do? How is that scalable? The Save-A-Lake Hoogers campaign needed to make it easier for people to get on board with their project. They needed to help people understand the importance of wildlife conservation inside the

city itself, to give Angelinos a clear reason to support the crossing. They needed P-22. Listen, it's no accident. You know, this is LA. And LA loves their celebrities and worships them. And here's this cat that literally lives under the Hollywood sign. He's handsome. He's, you know, challenged with his dating life. It is a made for Hollywood movie. Since his discovery, Angelinos have gotten to know P22, with every passing encounter, he was less a fearsome mountain lion prowling Griffith Park, and more of a neighbor. Someone you might run into as you take out your trash or go out in a morning walk.

Save LA Cougars used that recognition to get people to care about the crossing. The campaign also helped build a narrative around P22. He was the young cub struck out on his own and by some stroke of luck survived crossing two major highways. He then landed in Los Angeles' most famous park where he himself became famous. Except now he was isolated, alone even, needing to find a way back out. It was a story people could connect to, and many did. His story just resonates, compared to any other animals. No other story is bigger than this one.

Starting in 2016, the Saebele Cougars campaign organized an all day festival in Griffith Park called P22 Day. There, Angelinos can sign up for group hikes along parts of P22's 40-mile trek. Festival goers can even buy P22 swag like a 1C or a tow bag. And most importantly, they can donate to the wildlife crossing. The campaign held their most recent event just last month. What I love about Pete 22 is that he reflects the struggles of finding a mate in the urbanized area of Los Angeles, which I feel like I face the same struggles. Pete 22, Pete 22, Pete 22, Pete 22, Pete 22, Pete, Pete, Pete. Initially, Beth felt a little strange about all of this.

She and her campaign succeeded in making people care about a lace mountain lion, but it wasn't a science that brought them in. It was P-22 celebrity. The campaign was anthropomorphizing P-22, which is something that scientists usually try to steer clear of. Listen, there are people who hate my approach to the campaign. I hate ants or more. Even people in my own organization, like I'm committing heresy with some of these, you know, traditional scientists. I'm really curious about that. Is that part of kind of a

just like an old school? Like you do not need to, yeah, more fives or like tell me a story. Like we should strictly follow follow the science and hope that the funding comes through. So I think there's just a lot of people who are just educated in that very hard science mode and they have a hard time with Andrew Morpheizing. But turning a Puma into a character has gotten results. The campaign to build the wildlife crossing

has raised more than $105 million from foundations and private donations. A lot of it on the back of B-22's story. The whole thing has been a success beyond Beth and her colleagues' wildest imaginations. And we want to welcome everybody watching to the groundbreaking for the Wallace, Annaburg, wildlife crossing. Woohoo! The work on the crossing actually began earlier this year.

Beth spoke from the site above a section of the 101 Freeway, an area that P-22 may have crossed himself on his way to Griffith Park. And we are so honored to be here and celebrating with you all, who looked at this impossible dream and like me said not on my watch We are not gonna let this mountain line population go extinct on our watch The backdrop of her speech was a reminder of just what a mountain line is up against a non-stop stream of cars and trucks the highway itself runs parallel to the Santa Monica Mountains,

separating it from the Seamy Hills and the larger Los Badgers National Forest of the North. The stretch of road is the biggest obstacle for mountain lions who want to find more mates and more land. And because the crossing is in a major city, designers and landscape architects have their work cut out for them to encourage animals to give the bridge a try. The team is talking to experts on

light pollution, fungi, ecological restoration, fencing, and even sound design. When it's done, it'll be 210 feet long and 175 feet wide. So yeah, there's a lot of technique. We know how to mimic the habitat and attract them there. You know, one of the reasons ours is so wide is you're getting up to make the animals feel like they're not on the highway. So you can't just put like a we get asked why can't you just do four feet and save money. Well, a couple animals might use it, but you need it to look like the landscape. So like for every foot long, there's a ratio. It has to be, you know, that much more wide.

And once a few animals check out the crossing and see that it works, more of them will follow. Word literally gets out in the animal world. A few weeks back, I went out to the site of the crossing to get a feel for the landscape. So this is the site of the future Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing in aora Hills. This is actually the famous neighborhood of the Kardashians. I don't know which Kardashians but maybe Kim

Kylie. Those are the only two I know. I was wrong. The Kardashians live about 15 minutes east from here. But anyway you you get the idea. This is, there's a lot of open space. You can see the Santa Monica Mountains. It's gorgeous out here. I asked Kat Superfisky to join me at the construction site for this crossing. She says, cool as her last name is fun to say. She's also a designer and educator

in the city of LA's first urban ecologist. We're hiking past a deep trench that starts at the edge of the site and creeps up the hill. This is one end of that future bridge. An area where wild animals are known to cross anyway and where they would typically run into fast-moving cars. Even from where we're standing right here, you see the clear linkage. We're standing on one kind of mountain, mountainous area. We're looking down to another one. If you're an animal, you're gonna want to connect

to that other, the hill sides. And so they would, again, make it up to the 101 freeway and then they would have no option other than to cross it to get to the other side. And right now we're providing pretty challenging conditions for them to have across that like Frogger. So it's good to think of this as a funnel of sorts. Yep, really. And that's why this site was chosen. Exactly. Yeah, when the National Park P-22 and Cat arrived in the city around the same time. And back then, she just wasn't aware of the possibilities of humans coexisting with nature,

with wildlife in a place like Los Angeles. I showed up thinking that there wasn't gonna be a lot of nature in LA, and that I was gonna be starting kind of from, you know, the concrete itself. And so, you know, it took me a couple years to really change the way that I saw a place like LA and I practiced a lot, peeling back the concrete

and the steel and infrastructure and kind of crossing my eyes and staring at the landscape around me and saying, okay, I can still actually kind of see the mountains. The topography in the landform is still there. There is a great irony in all this. Despite all the effort, we have no way of knowing whether P-22 will actually use this bridge. The Agora Hills are about 25 miles west of Griffith Park.

Scientists say that as an older Puma, he's likely to play it safe, stay put, and accept his fate as a forever bachelor. But we do know that many, many other animals will use that crossing. Foxes, Bobcat, Steer, and other mountain lions looking to find a mater, more space to call their own. Beth and Miguel both acknowledged that they used P-22 to try to do something bigger, to begin to stitch the fragmented habitat of Los Angeles back together, to get Angelinos to start thinking of their city as an ecosystem. In these days, it's not just scientists and environmentalists who want to talk about P-22. One mother told me her son thinks P22 is a superhero,

and he runs around the house with a cape and saying, you know, I'm P22, and I'm going to say, like, it's that fundamental connection that is less about science that I am hopeful about, because I think LA kids especially, they know these cats like they know football players. For all we know, P-22 is living a humble and relatively happy mountain lion life in his municipal park.

But unknowingly, he's got us on the same page about something important, not just the need to build a huge wildlife crossing in Los Angeles, but the need for coexistence, for connectivity. So that in a big city like LA, you, me, P-22, and all the other urban dwelling wild animals can all feel a little less alone. When we come back, a wildlife crossing in action. All right, I'm back with our producer, Rook Sandrick Weedy. Rooks, you have one more thing that you want to share with us about these wildlife crossings. Yeah, I have one more quick and kind of a silly thing, except I know I'm not the only one who

geeks out on this stuff. So I'm going to have you open up this clip and watch it with me. It's really short. So we'll just play the whole clip. Okay, so it's a coyote jumping through a tunnel, and it seems to be playing with a badger and trying to get it to follow it down the tunnel. Is that what I've seen? Exactly. It's like these two buddies are meeting up by the end of the tunnel and I just love how excited that Coyote is.

He looks just like a dog when he spots his leash somewhere and he's ready to go for a walk. Totally, totally. This is so great. So what is going on in this clip? Well, it went viral about two years ago. And what I love about it is that the tunnel they are merrily strolling through, it's actually a wide life crossing. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This one specifically is a wide life underpass. And it's in California further up the 101 up near Gilroy, a few miles south of San Jose. And this is the same one of one that runs through LA and is a big problem for, you know, for mountain lions in the area that we were talking about in the story. Yeah, exactly. So this underpass was built to seemingly

help with that habitat fracturing and to prevent road kill, not to mention all the accidents and deaths that vehicle animal collisions create, you know. Which is not a small number. No, not at all. Research shows that there are between one and two million Vehicle and large animal collisions every year in the US and Thousands of those accidents result in some sort of human injury and sometimes even in human deaths

Yeah, and almost always the death of the of the animal too. Oh, yeah, definitely So what we're seeing in this video of the animal too. Oh yeah, definitely. So what we're seeing in this video with this underpass and this coyote and this badger, is this typical behavior for these two or is the underpass like causing them to behave differently or what is going on?

You know, that's a great question. Coyotes and badgers were not widely known to hunt together until kind of recently, and this video shows that dynamic because a coyote can chase and catch its prey and a badger can dig if the prey heads underground. So the video helps show scientists this collaboration among species. So it's like, you know, they're doing what they normally do. They just happen to be doing it while crossing under the one on one.

That's right. Exactly. If anything, the underpass facilitated them to go on and do the thing that they do. And you know, there's a lot of videos out there documenting animals using a crossing. There's this video of a Florida panther and it's kittens going under an interstate in Florida

and a bobcat and her kittens sort of excitedly prancing under a bridge in Salinas, California. I mean, I would imagine just like turning P22 into a celebrity to make a wildlife crossing happen that a video like this reinforces that this is an issue, that there should be awareness of it. And when it's solved, it's extremely adorable. Oh, wow.

And so knowing these stories and seeing these videos like this, is it really changing the way people are thinking about wildlife crossings when they're doing new construction? Yeah, actually, just recently, a bill was passed in California that makes the California Department of Transportation prioritize crossings when they're working on or building new roadways. That sounds like a good thing. It is a very good thing. But the real solution would be to stop building

so many damn roads in the first place so that these animals wouldn't have to cross our busy highways. That's true. This doesn't have to be a problem that we solve. It could be just a problem that we just don't create. There you go. Yeah. Well, thanks again for sharing the story with us, Roxane.

We really appreciate it. Thank you, Roman. 99% Invisible was Produced This Week by Roxane Draguiti, edited by Jason Dillion and Emmett Fitzgerald. Sound mixed by Martin Gonzales, music by a directorctor sound swan rial, fact checking by gram hasha. The Laney Hall is the senior editor, Kurt Colstad is the digital director, Olivia Green is our intern. The resident includes Vivian Le, Lashemadon, Chris Barouba, Christopher Johnson, Jacob Moltenado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are part of Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family.

Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99 PI org. Run Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Forget it, Stitcher. It's Cougar Town.