Friday Night Soother

Created
Sat, 27/05/2023 - 09:30
Updated
Sat, 27/05/2023 - 09:30
Urban jungle edition Rick Perlstein sent me this from Chicago: New York, the famous escaped Owl named Flaco: And the latest from here in Los Angeles, some wonderful news: Mountain Lion cubs! World, meet P-113, P-114, and P-115. That’s the designation for three healthy, month-old female mountain lion kittens that biologists recently discovered nestled in a dense patch of poison oak growing around large boulders in the Simi Hills. The sisters belong to P-77, a 5- or 6-year-old lion who biologists captured and radio-tagged in the same area a few years ago. Researchers hope to do the same with the three kittens late next year, just before the girls get old enough to leave their mom. Tagging these lions is part of a National Park Service study that’s been going on in and around the Santa Monica Mountains since 2002, in an attempt to determine how the cats survive — or don’t — and what might help to stabilize their threatened existence. Each year, local mountain lions are killed trying to cross nearby freeways, by poachers, and through exposure to rat poison and other hazards that come with living so close to an urban center. Fenced into the area by the 101 and 405 freeways, and other man-made obstacles in other parts of Southern California, area mountain lion populations are struggling with the effects of inbreeding that researchers say could one day wipe them out. And last year was a particularly brutal one for local mountain lions, including the death of world-famous P-22. That’s why…