Camera-ready cougar is dead
The mountain lion P-41, whose movements through the Verdugo Mountains were documented in stunning photographs by citizen scientists, has been found dead.
Residents found the male puma Wednesday near Shadow Hills, National Park Service officials said.
The cause of death had not been determined. The cat had been dead for several days, and the carcass was decayed, said Kate Kuykendall, spokeswoman for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife will conduct a necropsy in the next couple of weeks, she said.
At about 10 years old, P-41 was considered to be of advanced age for a mountain lion in the wild. But his death could have been hastened by causes including rat poison and the La Tuna fire, which burned more than 7,000 acres in the Verdugos last month.
“P-41 had already overcome a number of challenges to survive in a relatively small home range with habitat fragmented by roads and development,” said Jeff Sikich, a biologist for the national recreation area. Sikich captured and collared P-41 in 2015.
The roughly 130-pound animal was a subject of amateur scientists Johanna Turner and Denis Callet, whose photographs were featured in a 2015 Times article.
Turner, a sound effects editor for Universal Studios, makes a hobby of setting up motion-controlled cameras to capture shots of Southern California’s mountain lions in their habitats.
She said Thursday that she photographed P-41 thousands of times, including hundreds of hours of video, and provided the images to the National Park Service for research. Her last photo was Aug. 3.
Though she never saw P-41 in person, she believes the cougar interacted with her through her camera.
“If I put a camera in a new spot, sometimes if he wasn’t in the mood to get a flash bulb, he would come up, stop, look around and leave,” she said. “I would get pictures of his butt.”
Turner said she believes that P-41 fathered two litters but that none of his four offspring reached adulthood in the wild. Two were hit and killed on freeways, and two were captured and live in a wildlife refuge in Riverside, she said.