On the other hand, while I’m glad the hunting ban has allowed mountains to thrive once again, they seem to have lost their fear of man. I’ve often seen mountain lions over the years, but never saw them for long until recently. They’d usually slink off at the first sign of a human. But now they’re more likely to stand and watch as you pass by. I don’t know what the solution is; I don’t think resuming hunting is the answer, but for their good, as well as ours, we’ve got to find a way to restore their healthy fear of man.

The situation, as I think we both agree, isn’t nearly as discrete as that. Have you read Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: Architecture of the 4 Ecologies? He picks up on the metaphor of the palimpsest in an effort to point out how LA’s roads tend to follow the traces of past movements through the basin.

Thinking of this situation, it’s a reminder that Nature – the coyote, the mountain lion – is never wholly absent, never wholly gone. And even more importantly, animals don’t imagine the world as a series of discrete spaces – it’s just in their nature to do so. The problem is, that way of imagining nature – as something always among us – is kind of terrifying, especially for people who build up their world so that they might be in control of it.

We’ve both done a series of posts and commented back and forth about the tough times the drought has brought to the regions wildlife. Local police aren’t equipped to handle and Fish and Game doesn’t have the resources to react fast enough when they get calls. Sometimes they have good results other times its horrific it just depends on what resources are available at the moment.