How a celebrity cat inspired the construction of the world’s largest wildlife corridor

Healfromzero.com – EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action. In a city best known for its movie stars, one of Los Angeles’ most beloved residents always stood out among the rest: he strutted through the streets in a tawny-colored coat, walked on all four paws and had a habit of wandering alone at night.

The California mountain lion, known as “P-22,” journeyed across two of the busiest freeways in the United States to take up residence inside Griffith Park — one of Los Angeles’ most popular urban parks. Using remote camera traps, wildlife photojournalist Steve Winter captured an iconic image of P-22 roaming beneath the illuminated Hollywood sign at night in 2013. The photo helped catapult the cougar to international stardom.

“People fell in love with this cat, he was a celebrity in the land of celebrities,” Winter said. “It was like a movie.” Their husbands were killed by tigers. Now these women are restoring the big cat’s habitat Seen resting in backyards and grazing on garden plants, P-22 amassed a huge following as he was caught on more of Winter’s camera traps and residents’ security cameras around the park’s neighborhoods.

But his small 6.7-square-mile range inside Griffith — and his ventures into densely urban spaces — ultimately led to his decline. Due to severe injuries caused by a car collision, combined with illness, he was euthanized in 2022. The famous feline’s story highlights a much bigger problem facing all big cats: they are losing land — and some have lost more than 90% of their former range.

“It’s not only that animals are losing habitat, but remaining habitat is becoming really fragmented, with areas often cut by roads that are nearly impossible to cross,” environmental journalist Sharon Guynup told CNN. “They’re prisoners in these areas,” Winter said, “so we need to find a way to give animals the opportunity to cross these roads that have them hemmed in.” The plight of P-22 helped bolster a movement to create the world’s largest wildlife overpass across greater Los Angeles’ 10-lane Highway 101 — the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. It connects the Santa Monica Mountains and the Sierra Madre Range, two significant stretches of wild territory in the region.

The 165-foot-wide crossing is set to open December 2, allowing wildlife to flow freely above the traffic below. Winter and Guynup have spent decades documenting big cat species all over the globe. Winter with images and Guynup with words, the two combine strong visual and written storytelling in their new National Geographic book, “Big Cats.” “We didn’t want to make this a greatest hits photo book; we wanted to focus on stories that had tangible impact,” Guynup said.

From exposing illegal wildlife trade to inspiring conservation legislation, their book takes readers behind the lens of some of their most risky but rewarding work to help save big cat populations around the world. And for Guynup, the stakes extend far beyond the animals themselves: “We need the entire spectrum of life to keep ecosystems healthy, and big cats have an outsized role in that process,” she said. The Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, is home to one of the biggest concentrations of jaguars on Earth.

It was here, while coasting through the waters of Corixo Negro in 1997, that Winter encountered his first jaguar while on assignment for National Geographic’s first major feature story on the big cats. At the time, Winter said, local ranchers believed that the jaguars were killing their cows, “so they thought the only good jaguar was a dead jaguar,” he told CNN. They were hunted in retaliation, their fur sold for profit.

Winter began working with biologist Sandra Cavalcanti, who through GPS collar tracking, was able to prove that cattle make up less than a third of the jaguars’ diet, which can include up to 85 different animals. Other factors, such as disease and malnutrition, caused more cattle deaths than jaguars. Cavalcanti’s research, alongside Winter’s photographs in National Geographic, helped change the narrative around jaguars — from something feared, to something worth protecting.

By identifying the Pantanal region as a hotbed for wild jaguar sightings, Brazil saw economic value in keeping these animals alive and investing in wildlife ecotourism. “Now, Jaguars are worth more alive than dead and numbers have increased despite droughts and increasing wildfires, and people are much less likely to kill them now because they bring a lot of money into the area,” Guynup said. In 2011, Winter was covering a story on two subspecies of tigers thought to be the next to go extinct — one being the critically endangered Indochinese tiger, found exclusively in Thailand and Myanmar.

Winter visited Thailand’s Tiger Temple, a Buddhist monastery and popular tourist attraction where people paid to pet and pose with Indochinese tigers. Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua temple billed itself as an animal sanctuary, but for years, conservationists suspected its involvement in the black-market trade of tigers and their body parts. After Guynup and Winter published a book featuring photos from the temple, Guynup was contacted by wildlife biologist Sybelle Foxcroft, who said she could help prove that the temple was involved in an illegal wildlife trafficking ring, Guynup recounted.

Guynup and Foxcroft spent a year working inside sources, obtaining CCTV and audio recordings, and uncovering documents proving the temple was tied to the illegal trade. “When the story ran in 2016 it kicked up a furor both domestically and internationally, and within four months, the [Thai] government went in and confiscated the tigers and shut it down,” Guynup said. A few months before the popular Netflix documentary series “Tiger King” first aired, Guynup and Winter released a 30-page feature in the December 2019 issue of National Geographic, exposing the scale of big cat breeding and exploitation in the US.

“We had more tigers in captivity in the United States than were left in the wild in Asia,” Guynup said. Together, they documented a vast network of big cat attractions across 32 states — from small roadside zoos to large circus shows, many offering cub-petting and photo opportunities to the public for a steep price. Guynup even interviewed the infamous Doc Antle, then known as one of the biggest tiger breeders in the US, featured in Tiger King.

Through Winter and Guynup’s multi-year investigation, they uncovered the industry’s abuse of these big cats alongside the illegal trafficking of the animals. Their investigation helped lay the groundwork to pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2022, which bans private ownership, breeding or sale of big cats, except for accredited institutions. When the story came out, a copy was given to every member of Congress, Guynup recalled.

“Look, bills are boring to read, but if you’re looking at photographs and reading a narrative, then I think it can engage hearts and minds in a really positive way,” Guynup said. Ultimately, protecting big cats means safeguarding entire ecosystems. “When you protect a top predator, or a wide-ranging species, you protect a large area,” Guynup added, “and that protects everything that shares land with that species.”