Archive: Fauna

The city of Santa Monica sent residents an email alert this morning saying that "2nd St. between Wilshire and Arizona is closed down to vehicular and pedestrian traffic due to a mountain lion sighting. The lion is contained and The Department of Fish and Game is in route." Plus the first known photo of a lion in Griffith Park. More Update: Lion shot and killed.

State wildlife biologist Richard Shinn snapped spotted OR7 on Tuesday in California's Modoc County and snapped the first known color photo of the male gray wolf that crossed over from Oregon in December, becoming California's only documented free-ranging wolf since the 1920s. "He appeared very healthy," said a state wildlife specialist.

A Department of Fish and Game warden called to the scene of a mountain lion near homes in Sunland shot and killed the animal last Friday. DFG officials told KTLA the warden felt shooting the animal was necessary to keep the neighborhood safe.

There on top of the red van, in the Mitt Romney family pet carrier: those are a pair of geese.

He's back, at least for now.

OR7's quest has taken him back across the state line, the California Department of Fish and Game announced.

Equestrians of the northeast Valley will ride Sunday in memory of Bert Bonnett, a legend in the horsey communities of Shadow Hills and Sunland.

California's first wild wolf since the 1920s roamed east across U.S. highway 395 on the Madeline Plains north of Susanville in Lassen County sometime in the past ten days, then seemed to slow the "dispersal" quest that began last September in northern Oregon.

The Oregon gray wolf that entered California on Dec. 28 has been tracked moving through Lassen County and crossing several roads and highways.

The Los Angeles Zoo announced today that it had euthanized its 28-year-old hippopotamus. Jabba had been sick for about a month.

A female gray whale that summers off Sakhalin Island in the wetsern North Pacific was expected to swim past the Los Angeles County coast on Thursday and head south on Friday. Named Varvara by scientists, the eight-year-old whale is interesting to researchers for a couple of reasons.

A Venice landscape designer has a Facebook album of almost two dozen dog noses poking out as she walks by.

OR7 is ready for his closeup. Or he was back on November 14, when the first gray wolf known to roam in lower Oregon and California in many decades was likely photographed by a hunter's trail camera.

At least one of the family groups videotaped up close off the Southern California coast last month was back this weekend. Maybe they live here now.

OR7 crossed the state border yesterday, becoming the first gray wolf known to roam wild in California since the 1920s.

The pair of 5-pound cougars discovered beneath a parked car on Orange Grove Avenue apparently had not eaten in two weeks. They were taken to the California Wildlife Center in...

Wildlife trackers in Oregon have followed a lone male gray wolf on a 730-mile trek across the state, south toward the border with California. "He could be in Yreka in two days if he wanted to be," a California fish and game official says.

The pod of 12 killer whales logged previously in British Columbia was spotted off Ventura on Friday, off Rancho Palos Verdes on Saturday and off Newport Beach today.

The animal sanctuary on Little Tujunga Canyon Road is again on the verge of financial collapse and closure, founder Martine Colette says.

Reporters, editors and other staffers at the Daily News offices in the Valley have been told to stop feeding the wildlife.

Sunday's New York Times print edition carries an obituary of Alan Mootnick, the founder and director of Santa Clarita's Gibbon Conservation Center who died Nov. 4.

On Monday's show on KPCC, "The Madeleine Brand Show" is bringing back a recent interview with Alan Mootnick, the founder of the Gibbon Conservation Center who died on Friday.

Mootnick, the founder in 1976 of the Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, died Friday after complications from heart surgery.

LAPD K-9 units last week escorted the delivery of what the flackage calls 60 German Shepherds from a dog boarding facility in downtown.

A black bear was spotted on the grounds of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory early this morning.

Locals saved a juvenile shark that became tangled in fishing line over the weekend.

Echo Park Lake was drained a few weeks ago for an improvement project, but geese and ducks remain inside the fence.

A pod of seven killer whales is filmed going after a sea lion right beside a whale-watch boat.

The Vaux's swifts that come down the coast from Alaska every fall are roosting again in the chimney of the Chester Williams building at 5th and Broadway.

Once again, it appears the initial plan did not take into account the wholly predictable public backlash -- or the L.A. media's obsession with anything animal.

The spiders are out in L.A., plus remembering 9/11 at KPCC.

In tonight's column, my observation that Labor Day doesn't mark the end of summer here merges into some thoughts on crows and the mountain lion killed last week on the 405 freeway.

A male lion known as P-18 left his mother's home range in Malibu Creek State Park earlier this summer and was struck by a hit-and-run driver near Getty Center.

Jose Luis Sandoval of Wilmington spends his summer visiting the region's top birding destinations. Check him out on "Off-Ramp."

Cat shows are far more populist events than dog shows, says The Awl's Natasha Vargas-Cooper.

Those Paso Robles settling ponds look like something from before the dawn of sewage treatment, says Mark Gold of Heal the Bay.

She was stranded for 53 days, attracting crowds of gawkers to Del Norte County near the Oregon border and numerous efforts to help steer the whale down to the sea.

Whale-watchers on board a Redondo Beach boat were off Palos Verdes Peninsula on Monday when they got an unusual treat for these waters.

Many of her 173,000 followers on Twitter want to know about the animals.

The LAPD's anti-gang unit today raided the city's six animal shelters and confiscated the service weapons of animal control officers as part of a gun audit of the Animal Services department, the Daily News is reporting.

She has been lingering in the river since June, attracting daily crowds.

City Controller Wendy Greuel's news release cites reports about theft of animals and fraudulent time sheets at the Lincoln Heights shelter as the reason to launch a "comprehensive review."

Subway fear-mongering by Rodeo Drive merchants inspires a transit-rich fantasy.

Caitlin Barron, a Riverside County Animal Services officer who rescued an injured red-tail hawk from the 60 Freeway in May, released the healed bird a couple of days ago on Jack Rabbit Trail in the Badlands west of Beaumont.

A contributor at Leimert Park Beat posted a brief video of the parrots in his coral tree.

For yesterday's celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the Pink Taco in the Century City shopping center painted a donkey pink and tied it up outside the restaurant.

At least eight ailing sea lions were rescued along the coast this weekend, including this one at Santa Monica Beach.

The 50-year-old African elephant lived at the Los Angeles Zoo for about 20 years, then moved to a sanctuary in Northern California in 2007.

My Mar Vista neighbor, Councilman Bill Rosendahl, will talk on KCRW about raising chickens.

Good news for LA Observed contributor Deanne Stillman, whose book, "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West," will be the basis for a Hallmark Channel movie on mustang activist Velma Johnston.

In all the decades that Mammoth Mountain has been a destination for SoCal skiers, this looks to be the winter with the most snowfall. At least since they began keeping records in 1969.

Heal the Bay put out the call for help with the massive die-off of sardines and other fish inside King Harbor in Redondo Beach.

I don't know if folks will be as bemused in Redondo Beach, but the LAT's holy cow approach to the fish die-off works for me.

Thousands, perhaps millions, of dead anchovies are floating this morning in King Harbor in Redondo Beach.

Maria the famous Echo Park goose has had quite a first week at the Los Angeles Zoo. For starters, the name is now Mario.

'Tis the season for babies in the Los Angeles wildlife realm, and thus babies in distress. Mary Cummins, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and president of Animal Advocates, collected this...