For decades, photojournalist Steve Winter has traveled across the world capturing incredible images of big cats as part of his work for National Geographic. Yet he didn't photograph an animal professionally until he was 34.
"If anybody had said, 'You're going to work with big cats for 25 years of your career,' I would have said 'No, I don't know anything about big cats,'" he told Live Science. "But I learned from scientists and local people," he added. "That was very, very important — that's what, to me, was the biggest change in my life."
Together with his wife, author and environmental journalist Sharon Guynup, Winter has helped change laws around big cats in the U.S.; revealed the horrors of the Tiger Temple in Bangkok, resulting in its closure; and took an iconic photograph of the cougar P-22 beneath the Hollywood sign, which eventually led to the creation of the world's largest highway wildlife corridor over Highway 101 in California.
In their new book, "Big Cats" (National Geographic Books, 2026), Winter and Guynup provide a retrospective of their careers, looking at the fragility of these predators, the conservation work helping to save them, and the challenges they still face. Live Science spoke with Winter about his career, the changes he's seen, and why he's hopeful for the future.
Hannah Osborne: You've traveled all over the world and seen so many things. Is there one photograph that really sticks out for you, one that you come back to and think about?
Steve Winter: I always look at the images that have had an impact at the time. That makes a huge difference to me, because in the end, I know that in taking this [photograph], not only did I succeed beyond my wildest expectations, but it's making a difference in the world. Right now, I have just been putting remote cameras up on what will be the world's largest wildlife overpass, and that was started by my Hollywood cougar picture of P-22, Puma 22, under the Hollywood sign. [Editor's note: The common names cougar, puma and mountain lion all refer to the same species, Puma concolor.]
That changed so much in Los Angeles. I've never seen a city be transformed in their love for the fact that they have a mountain lion in a park in the city. What came of that was [people] thinking, "Hey, maybe we should connect these areas where these animals are living." [Editor's note: The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 10-lane Highway 101 that was inspired by the cougar P-22 is due to open Dec. 2.]
To think about that is pretty amazing, so right now, P-22 and the Hollywood cougar is my go-to image.
He became a celebrity in the land of celebrities; people loved him. There's a P-22 day; schools are using urban wildlife in their curriculum. The LA Natural History Museum has a permanent exhibit, and what is right in the center of it? The Hollywood cougar picture.
HO: How did the P-22 photograph come about?
SW: As wildlife photographers, we will often go to these meetings where people are gathering to save elephants, to save this, to save that. So I went to meet the scientists that worked with these cats in the largest urban park in the United States. I asked Jeff Sikich, a biologist for the National Park Service, "[Do] you have a lot of trails in that park? Do you have any that the cats walk on where you could see the lights of LA in the background?" He kept saying no.
When you're working with camera traps, it's very important to visualize the picture in your mind that you're after [when] you visit a spot. I just said, "Well, Jeff, you know what would really tell the story of urban wildlife is if we had a mountain lion under the Hollywood sign." He looked at me like I'm crazy, and said, "There's no mountain lions in Griffith Park." I said, "If anything changes, let me know."
Eight months later, I got a text. They had a trail camp set up to census bobcats [Lynx rufus] in the park, and there was P-22.
With camera traps, you don't need to sit, and I learned that from the beginning. For the second story I did, it was photographing a quetzal, which is a sacred bird of the Maya and the Aztecs. I knew nothing about birds, either. It's got a meter-long [3 feet] tail. I was enamored by the fact that it had a historical background — they used quetzal feathers as a form of currency; they were sacred birds.
I loved all that, but working on that story in a cloud forest in Guatemala on top of a mountain all by myself, every morning I'd come down and set my camera up on the tripod [near the bird's nest], and then take it away at the end of the day. I'd walk back, and all of a sudden, the hair on the back of my head would stand up and on my arm, and I'd get this tingling feeling and it's like, what's going on? I'd turn around. You can't see anything in a rainforest or a cloud forest because the proliferation of life is everywhere. One night when I'm reading my book in the one room shack that I was staying in my bunk bed, all I hear is the stairs creaking. Then I hear the floorboards creaking. Then I hear scratching, and then sniffing, outside the door.
I grabbed the walkie-talkie to call Juan Carlos, the naturalist that I was working with. He would find the quetzal nests for me. I asked him, in Spanish, "Juan Carlos, what is this?"
And he said, "Oh, Steve, don't worry; it's just a black panther [Panthera onca]." I've been there five weeks, and I said, "Well, how come it took you so long to tell me there was a black jaguar here?" And he said, "We didn't want to worry you."
Two Asiatic lionesses greeting each other with a nose-to-nose touch. (Image credit: Steve Winter)
HO: Throughout the book, you look at topics like poaching, captive tigers in the Tiger Temple in Thailand, and the way they're kept in the U.S. for entertainment. And a lot of these things are still going on. How do you cope with seeing that side of their lives?
SW: When I was first working on tigers, I was in Thailand. I was wanting to work in Thailand and Sumatra because they were the two subspecies that experts said may go extinct. I was working with the most incredible group of scientists I've probably ever worked with. They were trying to save the Indo-Chinese tiger [Panthera tigris corbetti] in Thailand.
But close by was this place called the Thai Tiger Temple. And I said, "Hey, guys; I'd like to go there." And they said, "No, Steve; don't go. These are bad people, and we think they're involved in the black-market trade of tiger parts and tigers to Laos and then into China."
That's a good reason for me to go if you don't want me to go. The first thing I saw was this huge sign that said "conservation." This was a Buddhist monastery. For some reason, the abbot had been given a tiger cub about 10 years before, and he fell in love with tigers. So they started a tiger tourism operation that brought in at least $3 million a year.
I could see something was fishy right away, because by then, I'd learned a lot about these cats. They kept saying that they always had 150 tigers. But you could pet tiger cubs for Instagram selfies or bottle-feed them 365 days a year. If you're breeding tigers, what are you going to have? More tigers. Something was happening to them, because the death rate wouldn't take over the birth rate when you're speed-breeding cubs, which is what they were doing. A female has cubs; they take them away immediately so she'll be ready to have another litter. You can only use the cubs for three months because after that, they're too big to pet.
They had all these tourist things where you could get a selfie with a head of a tiger in your lap. I was saying, "Why are these tigers acting so sleepy?" They're taking this giant head of a tiger and putting it in somebody's lap that's sitting on the concrete. You would think that if you put the head of a tiger in your lap, you're going to end up with your head in their mouth.
[Editor's note: Winter and Guynup worked together on an investigation into the Tiger Temple in 2016, which eventually led to it being exposed for its abuse and connections with the illegal wildlife trade. Shortly after, the Tiger Temple was shut to the public.]
Sharon did the investigation, and I already had pictures. But we went to do a video and go visit the temple again … By the time we got done, the TV stations in Bangkok had taken the video and showed it all over on the nightly news. We kept working on this, and Sharon wrote four more stories. And after the last one, the Thai government was inundated with people calling for the prime minister to shut it down. They went in with the army and the police, and what they found was horrific. They went to the freezer. There were tigers hanging on meat hooks, cubs in jars, with a little Thai flag on them. They shut it down.
Stopping this is really important. After that, we did a story on tigers in the U.S., which was very difficult psychologically. It was one thing to see them in Thailand, but we had always heard that there were more tigers in the United States than there are in the wild, and people would go, "What are you talking about? We don't have tigers here."
Sharon and I … we found a lot of the same speed-breeding cubs at these roadside zoos, whether it was Doc Antle's Myrtle Beach that was $500 a day, or some dumpy little place on the road down south where you can give them $10 to look at a tiger. They were everywhere.
After that story came out, the National Geographic Society gave a copy of this 30-page story that we had done for the magazine to every member of Congress. We got this text on 20th December, 2022, that President Biden had signed the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which outlawed all that. We were part of getting this law passed, which was incredible.
HO: What are some of the biggest changes in conservation you've seen over your career?
SW: Conservation was changing a lot in the '90s and 2000s. Alan Rabinowitz [a zoologist who served as the president, CEO and chief scientist at Panthera Corp., a nonprofit conservation organization devoted to protecting wild cats] had this idea after he had a lot of scientists in Central and South America give him data on where they were working and where jaguars were. When he took it away and just showed the locations, he goes, this is a corridor, a natural corridor, because now we're talking a lot about connectivity and how roads get in the way. It's like animals are in prison because they can't cross these big freeways or even small ones. Find out where animals are, their migrating paths, and put in an overpass or an underpass or something.
All this was happening, all this new science, new conservation. That was all spearheaded by the work of [biologist and conservationist] George Schaller, who became a friend of ours. What a life that we've had — and are having. We're still working on the connectivity part right now.
HO: Are you hopeful for the big cats in LA?
SW: Oh, definitely. The ones that live in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area will be able to cross the 101 and then go all the way to San Jose. They could actually then hug the top of a certain mountain and get close to San Francisco, which is incredible to think about now. It's a huge metropolitan area, so you're leaving one, going to another. But there's so much land in between, and they can cross safely.
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HO: What made you specialize in big cats in the first place, and what's the draw that keeps you coming back?
SW: Big cats are so charismatic and, to me, mystical. And they're an umbrella species, so if you save the largest predator, which is usually a big cat in any landscape, you save everything underneath it.
I was just taken over by these animals. National Geographic had never done a jaguar story before. I found out really quick why: You can't see them. I tried to use remote cameras, camera traps, but they're really smart. They'll go around them, so they don't have the flash going off or they don't like the sound or the smell of meat on these waterproof boxes and the cords and all that.
I just fell in love with big cats, and what a life to be able to work with every one of them. The only one that was on my list that I haven't done is the Amur tiger, Siberian tiger [Panthera tigris altaica]. When I was ready to photograph them with the scientists that had been monitoring them for over a decade, [the tigers] got canine distemper and about 60% died.
Big cats really bounce back when you give them protection, and there was protection given after you lose this many. All the study tigers that had the GPS collars on, the ones they could monitor, died. But the population bounced back, and there's more now than there were before.
I won't get to photograph Amur tigers. And the reason is, there's people — locals — who are working on it, and they're doing an incredible job. I've got a book here that has all the cats that I've worked on. The impact these stories have had, and the change that's come about, is what really makes me proud.
This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.
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National Geographic photographer Steve Winter has spent his career photographing big cats around the world, from the graceful jaguars of Brazil’s Pantanal to the elusive Himalayan snow leopard. His photographs astound; his stories, even more so. In Big Cats, Winter and environmental journalist Sharon Guynup share experiences behind the lens. In chapters on every key species—cougar, jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, tiger, and lion—readers will witness the power of Winter’s work, including uplifting stories of how his photographs have made a difference and powered important conservation efforts on behalf of these mighty creatures.
