Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
A mountain lion in front of the Hollywood sign sounds almost too convenient. When photographer Steve Winter proposed the picture, National Park Service biologist Jeff Sikich thought he was crazy. There were, as far as Sikich knew, no mountain lions in Griffith Park.
Then P-22 turned up.
Winter spent more than a year trying to get the photograph. Remote cameras were stolen, and equipment failed. Eventually, he captured P-22 walking beneath the Hollywood sign at night, his tracking collar visible around his neck.
The photograph made P-22 famous and gave Los Angeles a symbol of the problems faced by wildlife boxed in by roads and development. P-22 became closely associated with the campaign for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over U.S. Route 101, which is intended to reconnect habitat divided by one of the region’s busiest freeways.
The story is one of nine in Big Cats, a new book by Winter and journalist Sharon Guynup, who is also Mongabay’s wildlife editor. The pair revisit some of their most consequential reporting projects in the book in their recent conversation with Mike DiGirolamo, the host and producer of the Mongabay Newscast.
One of those projects took them to Thailand’s Tiger Temple, a lucrative tourist attraction where visitors could pose with captive tigers. Guynup and Winter spent a year investigating the operation and documented its links to illegal wildlife trafficking. Thai authorities eventually raided and closed it.
In the Himalayas, Winter spent months photographing snow leopards while working alongside researchers and local communities. While working on the story, he helped start a program that provided local livestock owners with free vaccinations if they agreed not to kill snow leopards. Winter said disease was killing about 30% of their livestock. After three years, the local community took over the vaccination program.
Winter approaches wildlife photography as a photojournalist, reporting on the people and circumstances that shape the cats’ survival.
Listen to the newscast episode with Steve Winter and Sharon Guynup here.
Banner image: This photo of P-22 the mountain lion took Steve Winter 15 months to shoot. After its publication, the cat became a worldwide icon. Image courtesy of Steve Winter/Big Cat Voices.
