Fate of famed L.A. mountain lions unclear after wildfire

The Santa Monica Mountains, a vast expanse of forest, hiking trails and movie-filming sites in southern California have been blackened by the Woolsey Fire. As of Tuesday, state officials said, at least 83 per cent of the 9,600 hectares of federal parkland in the range had burned.

The charred landscape was also the habitat for what is arguably the country’s most studied and most imperiled population of mountain lions, whose fates remain unclear.

The National Park Service said 10 of 13 cougars it tracks with radio collars survived and are moving, though that does not mean they’re uninjured. Two others, including a beloved bachelor known as P-22 who lives east of Hollywood in Griffith Park, wear collars that must be tracked in person — something the ongoing fire has made impossible. The GPS collar worn by the final mountain lion, P-74, has not transmitted data in days, said Kate Kuykendall, the acting deputy superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

“We are actually concerned about P-74,” Kuykendall said. “We just haven’t gotten any updates.”

Park biologists believe 10 to 15 mountain lions — also known as cougars or pumas — live in the Santa Monica Mountains, Kuykendall said; the 13 that are tracked represent some of those and others in a wider area that includes the nearby Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains. The park also monitors four bobcats that wear radio-telemetry collars. Their home ranges all burned, Kuykendall said.

“With some of the larger animals, like mountain lions and coyotes and deer, they can be pretty good at outrunning fire,” she said. “But a fire of this magnitude, in terms of the scale and the intensity . . . makes it significantly harder for them to be able to escape.”