What happens when one wild animal becomes someone?

P-22 was a mountain lion living in Griffith Park, surrounded by Los Angeles. He crossed two enormous freeways, spent more than a decade in an unusually tiny home range, survived mange and exposure to rat poison, and somehow became one of the most famous wild animals in America.

In this episode, I follow P-22 from the Santa Monica Mountains to the Hollywood sign—and into the much bigger story his life helped people see.

We get into the secret lives of mountain lions, wildlife communication, habitat fragmentation, rodenticides, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, and what happens when the lines humans draw across a landscape mean absolutely nothing to the animals trying to move through it.

Plus: Grizzly 399, Yellowstone wolf 1090F, a suspected koala incident, a mountain lion on Grandma’s roof, and my six-year-old’s insistence that P-22 looks exactly like our very-not-a-mountain-lion house cat, Bonez Malone.

P-22 — National Park Service

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/puma-profiles-p-22.htm

P-22 — Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

https://nhm.org/experience-nhm/exhibitions-natural-history-museum/p-22

Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing

https://101wildlifecrossing.org/

The Wild Quiet Companion Guide

Coming soon: photos, maps, wildlife-crossing rabbit—NOPE. 😂 —wildlife-crossing resources, P-22 links, and a few more strange and fascinating things I found while researching this episode.

[ADD COMPANION GUIDE LINK]

Find one place near you where an animal has to navigate something humans built.

A road. A fence. A parking lot. A neighborhood. A culvert. A bridge.

Then look at it from the animal’s side.

Where would you go?

The Wild Quiet is a podcast about nature—and our place in it.

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