‘Jumanji,’ who is more commonly known as 157M in research circles, was successfully released back into the wild — and we can expect to see him again (digitally).
San Francisco’s 30-hour ordeal with a two-year-old mountain lion strolling through its wealthiest burrows, a first in recorded history, will forever be remembered as an all-consuming fever dream … that was far from fantasy. The 77lb big cat was first spotted late Saturday evening, with footage of the puma criss-crossing streets around Pacific Heights and Cow Hollow; the massive kitty, which the internet fondly named “Jumanji,” eventually took roost in and near Lafayette Park, its exact whereabouts unclear much of Sunday.
CDFW returned a mountain lion to natural habitat early this morning after the young cat found himself surrounded by the busy city streets of San Francisco. A multi-agency collaboration came together to get the mountain lion out of a difficult situation and back into open space. pic.twitter.com/9UeCLMQ6UL
— California Department of Fish and Wildlife (@CaliforniaDFW) January 29, 2026
However, Monday morning saw a vehicle barricade encircling the aforementioned park as City animal car professionals, SF zoo staff, first responders, and eventually people with the State’s wildlife and fisheries department plotted to locate and catch the wayward cat. The cougar was tranquillized around 10:15 a.m., hoisted into an all-metal crate, and taken to a nearby rehabilitation center for evaluation by wildlife veterinarians. And once given a clean bill of health and his sedatives fully worn off, Jumani’s release location was set somewhere deep in the Santa Cruz Mountain Range.
But Jumanji, whose real name is 157m — a moniker given to him by researchers working with the e Santa Cruz Puma Project, which tracks and studies mountain lions — was far from a stranger to these neck of the week
Biologist Richie King of the Santa Cruz Puma Project noted the young male has been caught and captured multiple times in search of a territory all his own, coming. 157M’s most recent capture was in Saratoga, where King, with the help of other wildlife experts, was able to actually dart and relocate him.
“I was actually able to do the darting, remove him from this backyard, and we relocated him that time,” King said of 157M’s Saratoga sighting and subsequent capture. “Once again I was, ‘alright like maybe I’ll see him again, maybe I won’t.'”
It would be less than a year until King would run into the juvenile male mountain lion again … in San Francisco, no less.
157M has now been successfully released into an area familiar with the Santa Cruz and, now fitted with another tracking collar — most GPS-enabled neckbands on wildlife are designed to fall off after a certain time to prevent unnecessary complications — we can expect his coordinates to populate the nonprofit’s “puma tracker” map within the coming weeks.
