Cougar Crossing, well-paced animal-taiment on city wildlife

Cougar Crossing is based in southern California. It’s worth noting that Courtney Cox and Jennifer Anniston do not live at that intersection. This is an illustrated book that tells the story of P-22 a mountain lion that lives in the Santa Monica Mountains near Hollywood. Welcome to the land of city wildlife, near Beverly, Hills that is, swimming pools, movies stars and some rogue animals that don’t belong anywhere near them. This is a clear-cut case of the fact that the cougar, P-22 and his ancestors, were on the land first, but those desert hills kept attracting more residents. What’s a natural predator to do?

For P-22 the situation was especially troublesome. Being a male, the territory that he has to live on has to be claimed, factor in that there was less land to be claimed, he was in a pickle. The route to the mountains had been developed and that is what stood between him and countless acres to live his cougar life.

This left him no other choice than to go to the city. Being a cougar near a major city is a real-life version of Frogger. Unfortunately, Couggar, is played too often on highways around southern California and is a major cause for their death, in addition to possibly causing traffic accidents. Somehow, P-22 made it across 20 lanes of Los Angeles traffic to a green area that wasn’t claimed. It was an island of green, surrounded by a sea of city.

What he didn’t realize is that he’d staked his claim in Griffith Park, a rather small area for a cougar, that also had lots of human activity. He did his best to hide from people, but a big cat like this is challenging to keep a secret. People were looking for him, but for the purpose of being sedated and tracked. One night two wildlife professionals were able to sedate him, which yielded his official name, P-22, the 22^nd puma that was tagged in the area.

Urban environments aren’t easy places for big critters to live. All they want to do is be the dominant species, but humans have things like pets, poison for smaller creatures like rats, and the area is just not meant for their large, wandering ways. P-22 even broke into the Los Angeles Zoo and ate a koala one time. It sounded and smelled like a wild place in his defense.

By this time the public had started to really love P-22. They created the P-22 Day Festival, which was held in the relatively small park that he calls home. The festival was in the daytime, so he was probably sleeping in a cave on the other side of it. One aspect of the festival was to raise money and awareness for an animal bridge that would span the highway, connecting the mountains with the urban area. This way creatures can have a larger footprint to claim and dig into their animal ways without bumping into people as much.

Cougar Crossing is aimed at elementary school readers aged 7-11. It’ll be too challenging for most in the younger spectrum, but too easy to read for those older kids. Every reader in that spectrum will enjoy the book to some degree due to its art, charming story, non-fiction appeal, and more. The book has two narrators, Miguel Ordenana from the Natural History Museum of LA County and Jeff Skich from the National Park Service. They help smooth over the questions that readers are thinking to themselves as the story progresses.

To a degree, Cougar Crossing is comfort food for elementary readers who like true stories about animals, albeit with a slice of fish out of water. The illustrations by Alexander Vidal are realistic, but not so much that it will turn off those aged readers. Instead, it’s the sort of art that will draw them in, and coupled with the succinct text by Meeg Pincus those readers will find themselves interested in a cat they never thought they would be.

Cougar Crossing, How Hollywood’s Celebrity Cougar Helped Build a Bridge for City Wildlife is by Meeg Pincus with illustrations by Alexander Vidal and available on Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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