The Bears Next Door

A few weeks back I posted on my impressionistic views of wildlife coexisting with California suburbia. Today's LA Times has an interesting piece on the effect of suburban expansion into black bear habitat throughout the state.

The bears are loving it. California Department of Fish and Game estimates that black bear populations state-wide have increased from 4,000 in 1984 to just over 33,000 today. And this is in the face of increased hunting pressure - CDFG says in the same period annual take has increased from 1,000 to 1,800.

Exposure to humans allows bears to enrich their diet by eating garbage, pet food, and by raiding orchards. This makes for fatter bears. Also, the concentration of food sources allows them to reduce their range, so they don't travel as far to work off the fat. Fatter bears are more fertile and we have a population boom.

Human-bear encounters don't seem to have the same level of trauma that mountain lion sightings cause. The picture above from a backyard in Monrovia where a sow has parked her cubs in a jacuzzi while she "shops" is typical of the bemusement which locals display with bears. They get reported as nuisances and police and CDFG officials shoo them off or trap them, but there is a substantial difference in attitude as you can see in this panicky story of a lion sighting Monday in Altadena, another suburb.

In the mid-1990s, a bear nicknamed Samson, also living in the Monrovia area, became a staple of local LA television news. People would video-tape his nighttime swims in their pools, send the tapes in to stations and you would see a Samson story once or twice a month. As a local resident said of Samson, "He first came in the summertime when it got hot. At first, he came every now and then, and then it got to be more regular. He had a routine and would come down from the mountains and go swimming in the pool or the Jacuzzi. Then he'd go down the street and hit the trash cans, then he'd go eat avocados from the orchards until dawn. He was a big dude, and he'd just sit in the pool."

Locals noticed that Samson seemed to be having health problems (probably gout!) and he was eventually captured to spend his last few years peacefully in an Orange County zoo.

The resurgence of black bears seems to parallel the success of coyotes, where human habitation offers another food source for opportunistic scavengers.