Feral Cities (18 page)

The park is part of the Santa Monica Mountains, but thanks to the Los Angeles sprawl it is cut off from the rest of the range by the Hollywood Freeway and urban development. Griffith Park's unusual status as an island of natural habitat in an ocean of development had long piqued the interest of biologists. They wanted to find out if animals were traveling in and out of the park when the only safe routes to and fro were a few bridges and underpasses crossing the busy Hollywood Freeway.

To shed some light on this, Miguel Ordeñana, a biologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, put motion-detecting cameras around the park and the routes over US 101 to get photos of passing animals. Miguel wasn't looking for mountain lions. It was assumed that these secretive animals, which are also called cougars, wouldn't venture across a noisy freeway to get to a hard-to-reach park. Instead, he was on the lookout for deer, coyotes, skunks, and other animals already known to live in Griffith Park.

“It was February 2012,” says Miguel. “I check my cameras once every two weeks and I was looking through the photos one afternoon, hoping to see a bobcat as that was the most rare, coolest thing at the time. I went through the photos and was really excited to see a bobcat in there.

“I was really pumped about that and then, all of a sudden, I go to the next photo and see a big mountain lion in the picture. It was a huge surprise. I would never have expected it because, although it is technically possible for it to get to the park, it is just so unlikely. It was just amazing. As soon as I saw it I contacted my collaborators and Laurel.”

Laurel Serieys, a UCLA PhD candidate, had been helping out with a National Park Service project tracking mountain lions in the Santa Monicas. Like Miguel, she was shocked by the discovery of a cougar in Griffith Park. “The park is too small for a normal mountain lion gang,” she says. “He most likely crossed two freeways to get there, and it is unusual to see a mountain lion crossing a major freeway successfully. In fact, there's only one documented case and that was a smaller freeway. This freeway was ten lanes.”

Soon after, the National Park Service trapped the then three-year-old animal so they could give him a radio collar that would let them track his movements. Before setting him free, they did a genetic test that confirmed he came from the Santa Monicas and, in line with the unglamorous naming system the service uses for all the cougars it tracks, they christened him P-22.

The park service has been following P-22 around Griffith Park ever since. One area of keen interest, given his proximity to the city, is his diet, so every week Laurel and Miguel have been heading into the park to check out locations where P-22 was hanging around for long periods to try to retrieve the remains of his kills.

They invited me along on one of their trips. The goal? To visit three suspected P-22 kill sites.

It's a busy, hot Sunday morning when I join Laurel and Miguel at the park. The parking lots are packed and the footpaths are filled
with joggers and hikers, but we soon depart from the crowds to head into more rugged terrain.

The trek to the first kill site turns out to be an arduous trip, and I'm soon cursing myself for not following Laurel's advice to get some hiking boots. Sneakers are really not designed for scrambling up rocky hills or getting down steep gullies. Within minutes my jeans and shirt are covered in smears of yellow-beige dirt and my hands are covered in scratches from thorny bushes. Although we can clearly see the skyscrapers of downtown L.A. in the distance, the landscape is wild and unforgiving for unfit writers with inappropriate shoes.

“You're not going to die are you?” Laurel asks me at one point. “I hope not,” I reply weakly, before slipping down another slope on my backside. No wonder biologists call the cougars on our doorstep near-urban rather than urban.

“There was one kill that took me four hours to find,” says Laurel as we clamber through the scrub. “It was a really hot day, hotter than today. It was my first time out hiking in a while and it was insanely steep and thicker than this. I felt like I was very close to having heatstroke. I told Miguel I was just going to quickly find this kill and then we could meet up and we'll go find some more. Two hours in, he phones up and is like, ‘You OK?' I'm like, ‘I'm done. I don't think we'll be going out.' But I found it.”

After an hour and a half, Miguel calls us over. He has found something. On the ground by his feet are the dusty, dried-out remains of a kill. There are a couple of severed legs and a mess of fur, skin, and bone that was once the animal's rear end. There's also a skull, its jaws locked wide open, frozen in a permanent scream.

“It's a fox,” says Laurel, as she puts on her gloves and picks up the skull. “A gray fox.”

She looks more closely at the skull, which is covered in small patches of desiccated fur. “Is that a bite mark?” she asks Miguel. “It looks like it's been chewed on. I wonder if a coyote killed it. That would be my guess.”

I ask what makes her think it's a coyote kill rather than a P-22 kill. “It could be a lion but coyotes chew on the bones, whereas the lions don't chew on the bones as much. Lions will bite on the head more.”

She looks at the skull again. “I don't know if that's just the flesh rotting or an actual bite mark.”

There's only one way to tell, so Laurel pulls away the flesh, separating it from the skull. “Hmmm, looks like there is a bite mark. It could be a lion kill, although the lion would probably have eaten more than that. Theoretically, if it was a lion kill the coyotes could have got to it afterward.”

As well as the remains of the gray fox, there's a leg bone from a deer. It's been picked clean. “Is that a mountain lion kill?” I ask hopefully. “Ah, probably not,” says Laurel. Coyotes again. The evidence from the first kill site has proven inconclusive.

We move on to the next location. Along the way we spot a pack of coyotes roaming along the bottom of the hill below us, just a few hundred feet from the expensive hillside homes overlooking Griffith Park. The next kill site turns out to be within a large garden filled with stumpy cacti and guarded by a metal gate adorned with a sign telling people to stay out. Trespassing isn't an option, so we head off to the third and final kill site.

As we struggle up a steep hill, I ask Laurel what they hope to learn from P-22's leftovers. “A lot of people have misconceptions about what the wild animals are eating,” she says. “So it's a general diet study to show that they are eating deer like they are supposed to, even in these very urban environments, and that they're not just picking off people's dogs.”

So it's just a myth that P-22 will be feasting on people's dogs? “That's a very commonly held belief,” she says. “People will often have the misconception that mountain lions are coming into their backyard and picking off pets when it's more likely to be coyotes or other smaller animals, like owls taking people's cats. But people are always blaming it on mountain lions.”

Mountain lions prefer to eat deer and elk. In the Santa Ana Mountains on the other side of L.A., mule deer make up 95 percent of what cougars eat. Coyotes account for another 4 percent of their diet.

Nonetheless, cougar attacks on pet dogs can happen. In 2013 one pounced on a dachshund being walked near the southwestern outskirts of Colorado Springs. The lion grabbed the dog, pulling the still-attached leash out of the owner's hand, before running away and eating it. A few hours later the cougar was caught and euthanized.

Such incidents are distressing and gain a lot of attention, but mountain lions very rarely prey on pets, even when they are readily available. A study of cougar kills in the west of Washington state found that domestic animals, including livestock, formed less than 3 percent of their prey, even though the region examined included residential areas on the edge of Seattle, such as Issaquah. Of the domestic animals that were killed, the overwhelming majority were livestock, with sheep, goats, and llamas alone accounting for more than three-quarters of the victims. Nor was there any indication that the cougars were focusing their hunting in the residential areas, suggesting that domestic animal kills were opportunistic rather than systematic.

“Generally, mountain lions are not even getting close to people's yards,” says Laurel. “So for the National Park Service mountain lion survey, the majority of the mountain lion locations they get from the radio collars are a kilometer away from even roads. So despite being in L.A. where there are parks that are very urban, they will just stick to those core natural areas when they can.” The few that do enter the streets, like the one that entered downtown Reno in the summer of 2012 and tried—unsuccessfully—to enter Harrah's Casino Hotel, are usually young males looking for new territory after being forced out by older males.

So it's something of a surprise when the route to the third kill site takes us out of Griffith Park and onto a road. After getting our
bearings we figure out that the location is up the driveway of a large house. We head up to the front door.

Laurel checks the map again. The site seems to lie right behind the house, although Laurel doesn't think the kill happened in the backyard. “On the satellite images it looks like there's more open space behind the property than we can see from here, but those images are a few years old so it's hard to know exactly what is there.”

But there's no way to find out without going through the house, and that's a problem. After all, what is the etiquette for turning up on someone's doorstep, plastered in dirt and dripping with sweat, to ask if you can see their backyard because you think a lion killed something right by their house?

After a short discussion, Laurel and Miguel decide that broaching the subject with the homeowner is best left to a uniformed representative from the Park Service, so we leave empty-handed with not a single confirmed P-22 kill to show for our troubles.

Although today's kills proved elusive, other days have been more successful. “We got a lot more last weekend,” says Laurel. “We found a coyote, two deer, and a raccoon.”

On the way back, Miguel tells me how he hopes P-22 will make people less frightened about cougars living near cities. “The media likes to make these mountain lions seem very dangerous, but having P-22 right in this very urban area in a small park is a testament to how, even in these urban areas, they are not going to be like a coyote and start asking for food,” he says.

Although city life hasn't done much to change mountain lions, it has had a profound effect on another potential man-eater. For the past thirty years American black bears have moved into urban North America in a big way. From New Jersey to New Mexico, sightings and complaints about urban bears have soared as new developments encroach on their habitat and the appeal of garbage draws them to the bright lights.

Smart and adaptable, black bears have been making the most of what cities can offer hungry bears. In Colorado Springs one enterprising bear wheeled away a five-hundred-pound Dumpster from the back of Edelweiss Restaurant, just south of downtown. After dragging the German restaurant's Dumpster to a parking lot, the bear gorged on leftover Wiener schnitzel and grilled bratwurst. The bear must have liked its takeaway because the following night it returned to steal another of the restaurant's Dumpsters.

In Anchorage bears have learned how to deal with the electric fences people use to keep them out of their property, avoiding those with three or more electrified strands while stepping through the gap in those with just two wires.

Few places have had an influx of black bears as startling as that seen in the towns and cities near Lake Tahoe. Between 1997 and 2006 the area's bears switched en masse from a rural life to an urban one. Complaints about them in places like Carson City and South Lake Tahoe rose ten-fold and the number of bears involved in traffic accidents increased seventeen-fold. So many bears have moved in that the Lake Tahoe Basin now boasts one of the highest densities of urban black bears in North America and biologists are finding it a real challenge to find bears outside the city limits.

But the bears didn't just relocate. They changed.

For a start, they got fatter. Spoiled by the abundance of human food to eat, the urban bears ended up almost a third heavier than those in the wild. In fact the amount of food on offer in the towns and cities was so great that bears would even stop feeding when there was more food available, despite their need to eat fifteen thousand or more calories every day.

They became less active too. Their home ranges shriveled by as much as 90 percent and even in the buildup to hibernation they remained less active than rural bears. They also became night owls, rarely venturing out until the sun began to set, presumably to reduce their chances of bumping into people. In contrast rural bears are active during the daytime too.

There were odder, less easily explained changes as well. In the urban areas there were more than four times as many male bears than in the wild. Then, there were the females. In the wild the average female bear gets pregnant at seven or eight years old, but in the city they were getting pregnant at four or five. Some were getting pregnant as young as two years old, mere months after separating from their mother.