Updated at 1:02 p.m. ET
The mountain lion who spent Monday night under a Los Angeles home despite authorities' best efforts to dislodge him appears to have left on his own, a wildlife official says.
There is no sign of P-22, as the tagged mountain lion who lives in Los Angeles' Griffith Park is known, in or around the crawl space under the house in the Los Feliz neighborhood, Trevor Pell, a warden with California's Department of Fish and Wildlife, said.
P-22, as we've previously told you, has his own Facebook fan page and at least two Twitter accounts.
The Los Angeles Times has more on how he ended up under the house:
"The cougar had padded out of the woods of Griffith Park sometime after midnight and taken refuge in the dark, shallow space under the contemporary, white-walled home of Jason and Paula Archinaco."By midday, two workers installing a security system as part of a home renovation climbed into the crawl space. One worker quickly came uncomfortably close — eyeball-to-eyeball close — with the cat."The workers quickly ran upstairs to alert the owners, who called the city, which then contacted the state."
They tried a host of methods to lure P-22 out of the crawl space: a tennis ball launcher, prodding him with a long pole, even shooting him with bean bags. Nothing worked. At 10 p.m. local time, officials from Fish and Wildlife said they'd let P-22, who was fitted with a GPS collar about three years ago, leave on his own.
P-22, if you remember, was made famous by a photograph of him in front of the Hollywood sign that was taken in 2013 by a National Geographic photographer. Last year, the mountain lion recovered from eating rat poison and from mange. He now appears healthy.
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
