Wandering Mountain Lion Safely Captured in Altadena

It was a typical, if rainy, Monday morning in Altadena and Zach Bovinette was getting his two children ready for school. Then he looked out the front window and saw a mountain lion in his yucca plants.

The 70-pound cat’s gaze was fixed on the two fake deer in the yard across the street.

Bovinette calmly called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, then let in his two house cats, who were scratching frantically at the backdoor of the ranch-style home on Pine Street.

At 7:15 a.m., deputies arrived at the home just south of the Angeles National Forest. Wardens from the state Department of Fish and Game showed up, too.

Then came the helicopters, five in all, including news crews and law enforcement, neighbors said.

For four hours, Edison Elementary School, about a block away, was locked down, as wardens tranquilized the mountain lion and wrapped it in a blanket. Even CNN carried live coverage of the unfolding event, showing the sedated animal resting near Bovinette’s trash cans.

Residents said they hadn’t seen that much excitement caused by a wild animal since 2004, when a bear cub ventured about 10 blocks from the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to the intersection of Fair Oaks Avenue and Las Flores Drive. The young bear had noisily rummaged for snacks in the trash cans and yards of a nearby neighborhood and eventually wandered back to the forest.

Ultimately, the mountain lion also left without any problems, said Lt. Daniel Sforza of the Department of Fish and Game.

“What we wanted to happen is what did happen,” Sforza said. “We were able to tranquilize the animal safely, and we’re going to release it in the forest.”

Sforza said the cat was about 2 years old and healthy. He said he didn’t know what caused it to travel from the forest into the well-established neighborhood, but surmised that it could have been looking for food or water or searching out new territory.

He said it probably wandered down from the mountains sometime overnight and perhaps was planning to spend the day sleeping in the yucca. Usually, he said, mountain lions eat at night when their prey are awake.

“It looks like a young male,” he said. “Those are the ... lions that we have problems with. They are getting pushed out of their territory by the bigger lions, so they are kind of trying to find their own way.”

In his 25 years living there, Bovinette said he had never seen a mountain lion in the quiet neighborhood. But he wasn’t worried, he said, except about the mountain lion’s welfare.

“I was scared that the cat would have to be put down,” Bovinette said. “But Fish and Game said they would tag it and track it.”

Indeed, Sforza said the mountain lion would be tagged to identify it in case it ever returned to an urbanized area. Wardens also planned to monitor the cat for several hours after its release, until the sedative wore off.

Residents were startled at first at the commotion on their street, but like Bovinette, they weren’t overly concerned.

Bovinette’s next-door neighbor, John Slater, said he saw the sheriff’s patrol cars and went out to see what was going on. When he looked over his fence, he said, he saw the cat’s tail sticking out from the bushes on the other side of Bovinette’s house, and heard Bovinette shouting to him, “Oh, John, it’s alive.”

Slater spent the rest of the morning out on the street with his camera, documenting the drama. Like Bovinette, he said, he wasn’t scared.

“We just want to make sure they don’t have to kill it,” Slater said before the mountain lion was captured.

That was the general sentiment in the cluster of onlookers, who stood near the curb as rifle-toting wardens on foot circled Bovinette’s house, preparing to shoot the cat with a tranquilizer dart. After it was struck, the mountain lion darted from the yucca plants into the frontyard and came to rest near where it started, by some trash cans, shortly after 11 a.m.

“It was exciting that it was this close,” said neighbor Gina Jones, who said she had never seen a mountain lion in the neighborhood in her 29 years of living there.

“The poor thing, it didn’t do anything to anybody.”