How this photo turned a reclusive mountain lion into a Hollywood icon
“There’s no cat like him,” says Nat Geo photographer Steve Winter, whose image of P-22 helped make the cougar a celebrity. After recent irregular behavior, the aging cat has been captured for further evaluation.
When Steve Winter first floated the idea of photographing a mountain lion walking under the Hollywood sign, the biologist he was working with “looked at me like I was crazy,” Winter recalls with a laugh.
That was in 2012. Eight months after that conversation, the photographer got a text from Jeff Sikich, a biologist with the National Park Service, saying simply: “CALL ME NOW.” Sikich had unexpectedly captured a photo of a mountain lion on a camera trap right across from the Hollywood sign in Griffith Park, an 6.5-square-mile urban preserve in Los Angeles.
It was P-22, a young male who had miraculously managed to cross two major highways from his birthplace
