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Rosita Westhouse

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Aug 2, 2024, 12:27:54 AM8/2/24

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Parents need to know that Mountain Lion: The Ghost Cat is a half-hour length documentary about the mountain lion, or puma. Other animals get some attention as well, including condors, who feed on mountain lions' spoils. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.

Mountain Lion: The Ghost Cat is a short documentary about the mountain lion, also known as the puma. This South American animal spends its days lounging, and its nights hunting. Many other animals benefit from a successful mountain lion kill; once the lion takes their fill, foxes and condors come by and get the leftovers. They also interact with a llama-like animal called a guanaco; we see the males put on a show of prancing in order to woo a mate. Unfortunately, they're interrupted by hungry mountain lions. Mountain lions are the largest of the "little cats," meaning they're more like house cats in that they meow instead of roar like lions or tigers, aka "big cats."

This solid documentary is a standard "big cat attacks and devours prey" journey, but it's bolstered by an interesting locale and unusual animals like the guanaco. Mountain lions are scrappy and tough creatures at the top of their food chain, but notably, this docu also examines the chain reaction of their kill as it affects other, smaller animals. It's not necessarily riveting, but fans of cats both big and small will appreciate this peek into the mountains.

"I think when we started in this business, you used to, with quite a lot of precision, be able to say to someone, 'OK, come here in September, and this will happen, come here in November, [and this will happen],'" executive producer Keith Scholey told TV Guide. "And to a certain extent, now, that's all just gone out the window. The natural world, the whole world, is becoming very unpredictable. All these wild populations are having to deal with that unpredictability."

Our Planet II features its share of scenes rooted in the sad realities of nature (the producers never want to be gratuitous, but they also feel a responsibility to show the natural world as it is), but it's also packed with sights that dazzle and show off the power of nature. Here are five amazing things you'll see in Our Planet II, as selected by executive producers Huw Cordey and Keith Scholey.

One of the most striking images of the series occurs in the first episode: A Laysan albatross chick sits on a sandy Hawaiian Island beach that's littered with discarded plastic. Human interaction is a theme across many of these stories, but none are so obvious as this one. "Nobody's filmed a Laysan albatross in that way before, and I think the plastic story is such a powerful, sobering, and pointed story," Cordey said. Filming these birds came with another challenge: tiger sharks. Usually shy to the point that they'd swim away if a diver got in the water, the sharks during filming were so ravenous that they changed their behavior, including 15-foot tiger sharks nudging the boats. "Another huge shark came by, but this one didn't bump the boat, he bit the boat, and punched through it, so they had to do an emergency run back to safety," Keith Scholey told TV Guide.

They may not be very photogenic, but the locusts captured in the first episode of Our Planet II are a sight to behold. "It's a massive challenge covering a locust swarm, because it's very unpredictable and it can happen in days and disappear in hours," Cordey told TV Guide. Shooting during the height of the COVID lockdown, Cordey's team was helped by local crews across multiple countries to capture the insects' migration from Ethiopia into Asia, all while needing to stay ahead of WHO pesticide planes and U.N. intervention. The results are spectacularly creepy: billions of flying terrors casting out the sun across deserts and cities.

Luck is a huge part of capturing nature, and sometimes being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference. That's what happened while filming mountain lions in Chile. "These animals have been studied by scientists for some time, and they've become remarkably habituated to the extent where you can actually film them while on foot," Cordey told TV Guide. "We filmed this mother and her two cubs, and at one point, the mother has a large guanaco [a relative of the llama], which is a pretty large catch. It's so large, and she chases it and rides on its back. And it's an incredible shot and probably one of the most dramatic predation shots ever of a mountain lion, and the mountain lion brings the guanaco down within three meters of the cameraman standing on the ground with a tripod. That kind of shot is probably impossible anywhere else in the mountain lions' range."

In 2020, a group of wild Chinese elephants stomped across the internet when they took a most unusual journey. "It's kind of a news story, but nobody's put it on a broadcast show before. It's a story that was set in China, and it took place over lockdown when a group of elephants were sort of forced out of their natural forest. And they went on this massive walk trying to find a new forest because of a massive drought. There wasn't enough food. And these elephants just traveled 800 kilometers and ended up almost in one of the largest towns of the region before they were turned back." The pachyderms, in uncharted territory, helped themselves to locals' farms and food and moved on to a city before finally returning home almost two years later with the help of compassionate humans.

South of Jakarta, Indonesia, Christmas Island, the "Galapagos of the Indian Ocean," rises from the sea. It's home to one of the most massive migrations in the animal kingdom as the island teems with these tiny crustaceans, who battle modern marvels like roads and cars, as well as natural predators like ants and *gulp* adult Christmas Island crabs. "The Christmas Island crablets returned in billions, and it was the probably the biggest return of these little crablets in 10 years," Cordey said. "It was the second year that we tried; in the first year we got precisely nothing. Nothing can happen year after year. And we decided to invest more money into it the following year, and they came in on Christmas Eve and Christmas. Wow. And it's spectacular." Yes, crab babies are very cute.

P-22 was born circa 2010 in the western part of the Santa Monica Mountains to P-001 and an unknown female lion.[1] Sometime before 2012, P-22 headed east within the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park, where he settled after crossing two major Los Angeles freeways (Interstate 405 and Route 101).[3][13] His success in evading traffic on these major routes was highlighted, since multiple mountain lions have died after being struck by vehicles on Los Angeles freeways.[6][14] The exact route for P-22's journey is unknown.[15]

The Griffith Park Connectivity Study, funded by Friends of Griffith Park, was launched in mid-2011. FoGP entered a study agreement and purchased thirteen wildlife cameras. The study objective was to evaluate the movement of large and medium-sized mammals to and from Griffith Park and the surrounding open space. It was the first project in the Griffith Park region targeting potential corridors. The study was expanded further in 2013, to include tunnels to the LA River and other passages.

Daniel S. Cooper led the study. Erin Boydston of USGS Western Ecological Research Center also supported the project. Miguel Ordeana joined as a field biologist. The three ecologists, Cooper, Boydston, and Ordeana, soon began to document deer, bobcats and coyotes crossing via one of the overpass bridges of the Hollywood Freeway in Cahuenga Pass. Ordeana, poring over hundreds of motion-triggered photos, saw the first camera image taken on February 12, 2012 of the hind quarters of a male mountain lion on a rugged ridgeline just above Ford Theatre. The team released a Study Update in March 2012.[26][27][28][29]

Jeff Sikich leads the mission to catch him. He was first caught in March of 2012.[27] He was fitted with an electronic neck collar that recorded his location over time.[15] He then weighed 90 pounds (41 kg).[1] He was designated P-22.[27] P is short for "puma" and 22 refers to him being the 22nd puma in the ongoing puma study.[1][3][note 2]

National Geographic photographer Steve Winter worked with Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service,[31][33] to photograph P-22. He spent 15 months putting up camera traps in Griffith Park, and getting his cameras stolen, before capturing the now-famous photo of P-22 under the Hollywood Sign.[9][33] This image appeared in the December 2013 issue of National Geographic.[33]

In 2014, the National Park Service reported that P-22 had contracted mange stemming from exposure to anti-blood-clotting rat poison.[34][35] The Park Service captured P-22, administered topical medications and injections of vitamin K in efforts to treat him, then released him back into Griffith Park. The mange eventually subsided and P-22's health improved. The National Park Service again captured P-22 in December 2015 and found he had fully recovered, gaining 15 pounds.[36][37]

In 2016, the Los Angeles Zoo reported the disappearance of an elderly koala named Killarney, whose carcass was found outside of the koala enclosure.[38][39][40] Surveillance footage from the zoo showed P-22 (then seven years old) nearby on zoo grounds, although neither the GPS-tracking data nor camera footage recorded an actual interaction between the two animals.[38][39][41] Los Angeles City Council member Mitch O'Farrell called for investigating the relocation of P-22 after the incident.[42] The National Park Service called the koala killing "normal predatory behavior", and the Zoo declined to ask for a depredation permit for P-22, instead opting for more secure enclosure methods for some of its animals at night.[40]