I had tickets to fly to Los Angeles at the end of the week for the investigation of Mountain Lion, where I would meet with the biologists of wildlife, I would follow the cats in the mountains of Santa Monica by radio collar telemetry, and I will make a Tour of the Crossing Wallis Wildlife of Wallis Annenberg almost complete about 101. That plan went out the window with these horrible fires The contacts abandoned to deal with emergencies on the ground and quickly discovered that the sofas that they hoped to have sleep were already taken. None of the collar cats were caught in the fires, but their urban edge habitats already fragmented are fractured and further reduce.
For a manuscript that I am writing in Mountain Lions, this is a week that I cannot allow myself to lose. I changed flights to Miami, where another marginal population lives in southern Florida. In the southeast they are called panthers, the same species as those of Los Angeles, such as those that still exist anywhere in the Americas. Unlike Los Angeles cats that obtain genes infusions from the surrounding mountainous chains in Mexico and the United States, Panthers in Florida are completely isolated. Fifty years ago, between ten and thirty people who lived in the pastures of the payroll and the savanna of the southern part of the state were reduced. Now they are up to a couple of hundreds, still located at the bottom of the Florida sock, still dangerously in danger of extinction, and even more isolated than any other Puma concolor population in the world.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, mountain lions are taking it strongly, expelled by fires, frequently killed while crossing interest roads. Those with necklaces respond to fires when leaving more during the day with overturned night habits. Their patterns change as the territories are reorganized and a new terrain is explored, which includes unknown streets and rear patios. Cats that came out of the fire path have to move on.
Urban areas are garbage for mountain lions. They will take them if necessary, but the traps are many, high mortality. Add fires, double the garbage. After previous fires in Los Angeles, they have tended to participate in more risk behaviors because their territories were cut in half or erased. Seen more frequently by people, they appear in more door cameras while looking for prey and new places to give.
A great fire crossed the mountains of Santa Monica in 2018 and a corpse of Lion Mountain found several weeks later, hunger hungry and with burned legs. Other seventeen cats with GPS locators were directly affected by the fire and then avoided the burned areas while increasing day and urban activities. A study I discovered that the distances that ranged from a monthly 250 kilometers to 390 after fire, increasing overlap with each other, which can be dangerous, and with humans, which can be more dangerous. Highway crosses, the greatest threat they face, went from 3 to 5 per month.
I still had the tickets to fly to Los Angeles and spent a few days trying to justify keeping them, thinking that it would be a perfect time to stalk to steaming Chaparral to find trails of burned animals and write about the dangers faced by these isolated populations. However, it would be too gloomy. It would be a disaster tourist who took someone who really needs it.
Do not be misunderstood, Florida has their desolation. In 2024, of the 33 Panthers that is known that they died in the state, 26 were killed by cars. The fires from which they have to get away are the coasts very populated to the east and west, several million people who live with force around them. Telemetry data shows where they tend to hang out: grass, palm and pine -ups surrounded by swamps with cypresses and bromelia. I will have a high sheet rechargeable flashlight that at night should distinguish between the orange reflex of the crocodile eyes and the yellow gold to the greenish gold of the panthers.
In a sense, I am also fleeing the fires, an external effect ring. A radio necklace around my neck would put another point in a data set. Another opportunist has been expelled for a disaster, addressing a flight at the end of the week with notebooks and walking equipment so that I did not expect to be.
Photo: Mother Mountain Lion in the race (puppies shortly behind her) NBC4 Los Angeles, 1 am, January 9, 2025.
#Flare
