Save Sycamore Canyon in the San Rafael Hills

Even before we knew about the magnificence — one constrained by a limited territory in which to roam — of P-22, and certainly even before the big cat’s recent death, we knew about the importance of wildlife corridors here in our mix of people and wilderness.

Every big city in the world will have the occasional wild animal sighting.

“Coyote spotted in Central Park!” scream the Gotham headlines.

If every time I spotted a coyote it would be newsworthy, that would be a story a day, 365 of them a year.

But that’s because I spend a lot of time outdoors, here in the urban-suburban-totally wild microclimate that is living on the edge of the Arroyo Seco from Altadena to Pasadena to South Pas to Highland Park.

But the late Griffith Park mountain lion, who made it to his Hollywood Hills home by somehow crossing freeways, and stayed, well-fed but lonely for a decade, has properly become a poster cat for the need to have ways for the wild things to get around here in Los Angeles County, where we have real mountains — some almost a mile high — within our city limits, and where apex predators can still live, even if just barely, where they have for tens of thousands of years before we came along.

That’s why the Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy, the Pasadena-based nonprofit that preserves land and restores habitat in and around the San Gabriel and Crescenta valleys, has launched a new campaign to raise awareness and to raise money toward protecting habitats in the wake of P-22’s death.

“P-22 never fully got to be a mountain lion,” his ally Beth Pratt said at the Greek Theater memorial service for everyone’s favorite wild feline.

So in a new push for preserving an important local canyon as open space forever, AFC notes: “Without a means of passage between Griffith Park and other areas of natural habitat, he couldn’t move out to find a mate, and potential mates could not move in … P-22’s legacy is to remind us that saving land is not enough. We must connect islands of habitat with wildlife corridors. The only solution to isolation like P-22’s is to preserve, build or re-create safe passage in and out of these biological islands. We know that a wildlife corridor for cougars becomes a wildlife corridor for all manner of life, meaning genetic diversity, biological stability and stable ecosystems.”

After helping purchase Cottonwood Canyon in Pasadena, going up from the Arroyo floor west to the Glendale border, AFC’s latest push is for preservation of Sycamore Canyon near Chevy Chase Drive in the same San Rafael Hills as Cottonwood.

“This ten-acre block of land … is an essential part of an existing wildlife corridor, and we know that wildlife are actively using it.”

That’s ‘cause AFC puts out motion-sensitive cameras to capture the critters on video.

You can take a video tour of Sycamore at the group’s website, arroyofoothills.org.

“Chevy Chase obstructs wildlife passage through the San Rafaels, and consequently must be surmounted to realize the Hahamongna to Tujunga Wildlife Corridor, the 20 mile network of wildlife corridors connecting islands of open space including the San Rafael Hills, Verdugo Mountains and Griffith Park both to and from the San Gabriel Mountains,” the organization says.

You can help preserve those critters, and your own habitat as well, by making a donation on the AFC website to help keep Sycamore a wildlife corridor forever.

Wednesday at random

You’re going to hear a lot more about it, including in this space, but a warning for Pasadenans and for the mow-and-blow guys they hire to take care of their yards: April 28 will mark the permanent ban of  gasoline-powered leaf blowers in the city. Plug-in electric and battery ones will be the new thing. It’s not going to be easy to get the word out. But it’s going to be great, those silent suburban afternoons … Oscars night, it was so freaky to hear those military jets circling up and down the Arroyo Seco for at least 10 minutes. There’s no Dodger game tonight, I kept saying, no Rose Bowl Game … what’s going on? Then it turned out of course the F18s were all about a “Top Gun” bit for the opening of the Academy Awards. For which they were on screen over Hollywood for all of two seconds.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com