National Geographic story picks up more than mountain lions

Santa Monica Mountains cougar P-22 walking past Steve Winter's night camera with the Hollywood sign behind.

Douglas Chadwick's story on the "ghost cats" of the Santa Monica Mountains in December's National Geographic is up online now. Free registration is required to read it, I believe. Veronique posted earlier on Steve Winter's amazing shot of P-22 with the city lights behind him. The story also includes the photo above of the Griffith Park lion prowling below and to the west of the Hollywood sign. By my reckoning that puts him well outside of the park's wild chaparral. At least for that night. (More on P-22.)

Winter's night photos of a deer, a bobcat, a coyote and a human out in the brush accompany the story. He spent a year collecting images on the trails of Griffith Park.
From the story:

It’s a warm winter day in southern California, and busloads of tourists are pulling into an overlook above Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. As their guides point out movie studios and the mansions of stars, Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, directs my gaze toward a thin ribbon of woods in the distance. At least ten months earlier a young male cougar from the Santa Monica Mountains set out, following that trickle of green through the vast human hive. After somehow crossing two of the world’s busiest roads, including the ten-lane Hollywood Freeway, he settled in at Griffith Park, the huddle of hills rising just behind us, recognizable worldwide by the giant HOLLYWOOD sign partway up.

Homing in on signals from a radio collar on the animal, Sikich leads the way along the famous slope. He pinpoints the cat’s current location; then we hike on to check sites where it lingered to feed on a kill. We discover two mule deer carcasses dragged into tangles of scrub oak and manzanita. Remains of a third lie in a ravine next to the manicured lawns of a cemetery where deer often graze. We pass dog walkers, bird-watchers, hikers, joggers, bicyclists, horseback riders, and scores of graveside mourners. If any know they’re sharing this landscape with an invisible but potentially deadly predator, they show no sign of concern.

“There’s only room in our Santa Monica Mountains for ten to fifteen cougars,” Sikich says. “The average territory of an adult male there is around 200 square miles. With older, stronger males defending all the available space, this young one had to leave to claim a home of its own. Griffith Park takes in less than seven square miles, but our guy seems to be finding what he needs to survive here.”

Think of it: A large carnivore that must kill to eat is meeting its nutritional needs in the heart of greater L.A., all the while avoiding attention better than a camera-shy celebrity. How does he do it? By moving with a whisper-soft tread mostly in the twilight and at night, sticking close to thick cover, zealously guarding his privacy in a metropolis renowned as the gateway to fame.