Mountain lion invades house, refuses to leave
Digital Reporter
Tuesday, April 14, 2015, 8:04 AM - Worried about raccoons in your basement? Be grateful it's not something a little bigger.
Jason and Paula Archinaco have been temporarily evicted from their Los Angeles home after a mountain lion moved in, setting up in a crawlspace beneath the house sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning.
It was discovered by a pair of workers installing an alarm system in the house, and a call to animal control confirmed it was, in fact, a full-fledged mountain lion, known to wildlife officers as P-22.
"I didn't think for two seconds that it was a mountain lion in my house," Jason Archinaco told the LA Times. "If someone says Big Foot's in your house, you go, 'Yeah,' and you stick your head in there."
Since then, the apparently bemused big cat has been comfortably holed up, defying attempts to dislodge him Monday, which have apparently included firing bean bags, poking him with a stick and trying to grab his attention with tennis balls.
As of Tuesday morning, P-22 is still in there, and wildlife officers are basically just waiting for him to emerge on his own.
P-22 is already a bit of a minor celebrity in Los Angeles, when he somehow managed to successfully cross two highways to make his abode in the city's Griffith Park in 2012.
P-22's first capture in March 2012. Photo: National Parks Service.
Since then, he's been a regular fixture in the park, apparently doing well, although he had to be recaptured in 2014 when he was found to be ill from eating rat poison and suffering from mange.
If you've heard of P-22, it's probably from a magnificent shot of him in National Geographic with the famous Hollywood sign as a backdrop.
He's likely not happy with the media circus that surrounded him Monday as he hunkered down in the Archinaco home, but given the park's close proximity to built-up urban areas, this probably has happened more than once already without being discovered.
"In this fragmented system we have here, with roads and homes, they really can't avoid houses," Jeff Sikich, a biologist who has studied the animal, told the Times.
SOURCE: L.A. Times | National Parks Service | National Geographic
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