Wednesday's Morning Buzz reprinted an email from the president of the Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council warning residents that a dog had fallen prey to the mountain lion (or lions) that roams the canyons. Today Madame Prez sent a second email pooh-poohing the report:
I have just spoken to Rory Fitzpatrick (again) re the purported mountain lion sightings (and dog attacks/missing dogs). He has told me that he has spoken to the animal control folks as well as the Runyan [sic] rangers and that there have been NO mountain lion sightings.
And...
Fitzpatrick is the chief field deputy for Councilman Tom LaBonge. The hillside correspondent who forward the email to me also sent along info circulating in the hills today about a family of bobcats spotted at Hollywood Reservoir—with photos:
Last year, I received multiple reports of bobcat sightings on both sides of Barham. Here are four photographs I took last December near the lake. They show three different bobcats (I observed them following each other near the water line from the right to the left).
Now that that's cleared up - what's happening on the status of the Richfield Building clone on Western? Extant... or... extinct?
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I had a bobcat walk 6 feet right in front of my screen door on Laurel Canyon at 11:30 pm several weeks ago after it tripped a yard light on. I turned on more yard lights and it was magnificant with its extremely broad muscular shoulders and its almost lion like swagger as if it owned the place and then in a flash it took off. The next night at about the same time I heard something walking through the yard the other way so as not to trip the light on(clever bobcat! It not only can remember, and clock time accurately, but it can carry out a plan without the prey even being in sight or smell and then simply wait and hope). I listened a bit and heard something up in a tree on some branches about five and six feet high and went out. Suddenly I heard a fairly heavy animal jump and thump on the ground with some real weight and run off. I think my pets were being stalked by the bobcat so I took a more noisy and regular patrol of the yard with a high intensity led light and made lots of noise taking it back over a few nights and it just vanished. It made me appreciate just what territory really is, what we are as a very real force of nature in the mammalian hierarchy, and what you have to do to keep your terrortory yours!! The human's bright flashlight against the muscular carnivor in the middle of the night. A draw!But territory rules and the intruder must retreat and find new safer opportunities. Evolution has taken us on such different paths. But the bobcat surely tried to bring pain and death into my yard utilizing cunning, trickery, and was prepared to use lethal brutality at some risk to itself. I know the larger picture of human encroachment on everything on the planet, but on a really personal level I thought the animal a very unwanted cruel vistor from a very cold hearted natural world. Its that realization that truely scared me. Never has nature left me feeling so abandoned. We humans have got to be very careful stewards of our world for all species as nature left to her own devices can be absolutely vicious and uncaring and very unforgiving with an almost purposeless program.
The Bobcat is back at a new time! Two weeks ago, at 2pm, on a sunny day in Laurel Canyon I was sitting at my living room full length picture window blankly staring at the front yard and a grey with black markings bobcat with lynx like tufts on its ears came sauntering right on up the hill thru the yard directly to my window. Without the glass I could have petted it. It didn't hear or see me for some reason and I could see its yellow eyes processing the natural outdoors, while it was wrapped deeply in thought. I jumped up and went outside and it just walked away slowly down the driveway like it had not a care in the world. Realizing I was out there alone with a bobcat I looked around for a broom behind the car and when I came back it was gone~! Once again, a change in tactics of the cat, or was it a new replacement troop? Not sure. But its a mistake to accept the stereotyped information put out by various Bobcat sites. Look for other's personal experiences as there is more going on. The raw panic that came over me to make sure my pets were safe was really unpleasant. But they were ahead of me, sitting up on the flat roof hidden quietly watching. They too have adjusted their survival tactics, and now I must once again, adjust mine. We are all a bunch of animals still trapped in some ancient dance of predation and survival mistakenly thinking, in an age of suburban, citi-fied modernity that the old ways can't come back, but yes they can. And I won't even go into the four stalking and very mean racoons that come and throw themselves against the window and screen door at 2AM disappearing for a week everytime I chase them away. So now I have a boathorn to really surprise them next time they try and break in. Soon all this enlightened loving nature thing, and aren't these wild animals all so cute will be replaced with us all at each other's necks. Its amazing how one's pets can bring them right into the natural world. They have feelings about this just like I do except the human warrior has a broader and much more varied approach in battling the terror's of nature. They look at me in amazement when I confront nature and push it off one more time. Ultimately, nature never gives up though, and if it can't get us by quick surprise, it gets us in old age. Yes there is beauty there also, so many kinds, but then there is this other side that is incredibly cruel. If people only could really see just what this life actually is, really see, just maybe they would grow up and get it once and for all. For as a nation we live in a time of great external and self-imposed peril, all fruits of bad human judgement. Everyone wants to stand on top of the sand pile, good people and bad people and soon we will be in a world were nuclear proliferation will be in so many immature hands it will kill tens, hundreds, possibly millions of humans and animals and trees and plants and entire ecosystems all because of a series of interlocking bad judgements set in us by a nature that will surely limit our over-population in the only way it knows how. And we are playing right into its hands with each passing day. I know this to be true by the growing intolerance between people, even our own people. Just as native animals cannot break the yoke of predation and survival to control their numbers and keep the genetics of their species maximally tuned for foward evolution the same is happening to us. We don't see this because our species societies change the nature of the way things progress. Its a type of geologic time but in the mammalian paradigm with enriched uranium, plutonium, tritium, and if they could fusable cobalt so they could ignite iron and destroy our entire chemical periodic table. Then nature can start over and entropy can be preserved in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Then nobody benifits, and all that has been built has been squandered and forgotten as if it never existed--all irrevicably erased. Unless we all take a proactive strong effort to open up the doors of real communication for a very long time, we are cooked. This is nature's way. It knows no other way. But we, humans the only species gifted with a decent chance at establishing real intelligence on our earth need to act now to stop the slide of our technologies into a giant global consuming war machine that will grind us up like veal patties. Robert Oppenheimer knew what he had unleashed on the world, and if he hadn't done it another surely would. And they are lining up from timbucktoo to poughkeepsie to get access to the bomb as its their only ticket to a proud culminating armegeddon. If a bobcat could drop a bomb on a cat it would. Sounds funny, kind of, but its exactly what we are doing.
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