A mountain lion that’s already known to the media, has now found its new home under a house in the Los Angeles Los Feliz neighborhood. Wildlife experts have been trying to lure him out using different methods but the cougar remains unimpressed.
The mountain lion was first spotted on Monday April 13 when the owner of the house, Jason Archinaco, brought some people to install his new home security system. That’s when he noticed his new “neighbor” hiding in a crawl space. Ten hours later, the cougar was still there.
Archinaco told KNBC-TV that he thinks the mountain lion had been living under his house for some time now and that it won’t be easy to get him out as it considers this to be its new den.
The cougar is known as P-22. The animal usually lives around Griffith Park. It seem it managed to reach this urban area a few years ago, traveling from the Santa Monica Mountains, crossing two freeways and finally hiding under the house in the Los Feliz neighborhood.
On Monday evening, wildlife workers blocked the area, removing journalists and curious passers-by from the zone in order to try and dislodge the animal from beneath the house.
At first, they tried to provoke the cougar by poking it with a long prod but all they managed to do was to lose the GoPro camera attached to the prod which at one point fell off.
Another strategy they tried was to fire tennis ball cannon towards the crawl space hoping that if not the balls then at least the noise and racket would scare it. This method is usually successful when applied to coyotes but the cougar was once again unimpressed.
The next thing they tried was firing bean bags, a strategy also used by the police when crowd control is needed.
All the attempts could be viewed via live streaming. One could clearly see that P-22 did not show significant reactions. Officials said the next move is to wait and analyze its movement.
The P-22 was first spotted in 2013 when National Geographic captured a picture of it standing in front of the Hollywood sign. Other images of the mountain lion were captured in 2014 by one of the cameras installed in Griffith Park.
Image Source: 89.3 KPPC
