For three hours Saturday, P-22 was alive again.
He lived in the memories of millions of Angelenos, preserved on grainy Ring Cam videos, in artwork and in news-media accounts as the “Hollywood Cat,” — the lone predator to prowl Los Angeles’ Griffith Park in its 100-year history before he died Dec.17 after being hit by a car.
The connections to the famous urban puma were recreated by scientists, school children, philanthropists and politicians at the sold-out “Celebration of Life for P-22″ memorial held on a sunny afternoon at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, put on by the National Wildlife Federation.
The audience laughed at the images captured on a video montage put to “It’s a Living Thing” by the Electric Light Orchestra, showing the cat poking around the neighborhood and even inside homes in Silver Lake and Los Feliz, spooking drivers on city streets.
“I leave you with some impressions he made on people,” began Seth Riley, wildlife branch chief with the National Park Service who tracked P-22 for years. “In a video of his trip through Silver Lake, you can hear the person saying, ‘Holy bleep! That is a bleeping mountain lion!,’ ” he told the crowd, adding some final words: “P-22: Thank you for the lessons you taught us. Thank you for the legacy you left us.”
One of those lessons was co-existence, said the other P-22 tracker, Jeff Sikich, mountain lion biologist with the NPS stationed in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Sikich tracked P-22 for 10 years, sometimes using a blow dart to sedate him in order to affix a new radio collar around his neck.
“P-22 has taught us how lions can coexist with us in this complex landscape,” he said.
But how can a wild lion, one that hunts deer for food and in his later, more desperate months, fed on a resident’s pet chihuahua, coexist with thousands of L.A. residents who were his neighbors?
Michael McMahan nine years ago moved into a condo in the Hollywood Hills…
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