The Mountain Lion

Cougar, puma, panther, catamount, mountain lion: it is all one animal, and it holds the record for the most names of any animal, with more than 40 in English alone.

It also has the widest range of any wild land animal in the Americas, spanning 110 degrees of latitude from the Yukon to the southern Andes. The East was another story. The last confirmed eastern cougar dates to 1938, in Maine, and in January 2018 federal officials declared that population extinct and took it off the endangered list. What remains in the East is the Florida panther, roughly 120 to 230 adults, most of them south of Lake Okeechobee.

In the West the cat lives closer to people than most realize. The cougar known as P-22 crossed both the 405 and the 101 freeways to reach Griffith Park in Los Angeles and lived there for about a decade. His face helped raise money for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a bridge over ten lanes of the 101 begun in 2022.

The poster sets the cat on a flat rock, front paws together at the edge, tail curling up at the tip, eyes fixed on something off to the left. Misty mountains and one tall fir rise behind it, all in warm charcoal on cream.