Bears’ Walks on the Suburban Side

The Sierra Madre Fault underlies the San Gabriel Mountains, fluttering like a ruffled hemline at the populous edge of the Los Angeles Basin. It is a slip-strike fault, two enormous land plates grinding sideways against each other.

Up in the San Gabriel Mountains, the friction of immense things at cross-purposes is not confined to the seismic.

On Father’s Day weekend, a year-old black bear capered through the R-1 hedges and flowers of La Canada Flintridge. Its adventure unfolded as what foothill dwellers and TV watchers have come to recognize as the usual events of a black bear escapade: the amused children, the startled parents, the wary game wardens, the bear clambering up a tree, the tranquilizer dart, the wildlife rescue team, then bye-bye bear, back to your home in the wilderness.

And then, in the milkman’s hours of Tuesday morning, two bears perambulated through the rustic streets of Shadow Hills/Sunland, at enough leisure for one of them to rummage through a garbage can for his required 20,000 calories a day, checking out human discards the way that dogs in the denser parts of Los Angeles run free on trash day and eat their fill.

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In the game of paper/scissors/rock that is growth vs. wilderness vs. the demands of populations both two-legged and four, the bears are not very good players, but they keep coming back to the table.

Last summer, one strayed onto an Agua Dulce golf course; he was in short order herded off the links and back into the national forest by men on golf carts.

In the pre-O.J. slow news summer of 1994, Samson the bear emerged like a comic cartoon sidekick, lumbering about Monrovia snitching avocados, basking in hot tubs, watching TV through a sliding glass door until he was snagged and destined to set up housekeeping in an Orange County zoo.

It was heartwarming, but Samson made us forget for a moment that the foothills are not Central Park or Jellystone Park. Fires hurtle down these hills, and floodwaters. When the animals that creep out of the mountains do not act like Pooh or Yogi or Samson, we aren’t sure what to think. Last year in Azusa, at about the time Samson was still at large, another frightened bear was shot to death with 14 rounds from 12-gauge shotguns after tranquilizer darts didn’t stop him.

Several hundred thousand people live in these foothills; of local black bears, there are a few hundred, about the size of a high school commencement class, descendants of a few bears brought here in 1933 from Yosemite. That was 11 years after the last known California grizzly in existence--the hulking bear that you see on every flag of this Bear Flag Republic--was shot.

The notion of conservation came too late for the grizzly--the closest it came to conservation was being stuffed and mounted--but the black bear, as a statewide species, is thriving. It is our ability to deal with them, and the alluring but frightening wildness they represent, that may be endangered.

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There is one kind of deliberate recklessness in our dealings with the bears. It comes to light now and then, whenever Fish and Game agents find bear paw soup on a menu, or bear claws worked into an elaborate necklace, or they find a bear carcass whose gall bladder has been cut out and whose paws have been sliced off by some poacher.

The gall bladder can bring $20,000 and up in Korea, says Greg Laret, deputy chief of the state’s wildlife protection division; in many Asian countries it is considered to be medicinal. And the poachers cut off the bear’s paws as a kind of Good Housekeeping seal--to prove the gall bladder really came from a bear and not from a slaughterhouse.

A few hours after Tuesday’s ursine stroll, a Sunland man faxed his outrage to the Valley Edition of The Times. “Why is the bear here? Could this be the result of careless human behavior? . . . Stop illegal use of our wildlands, then maybe the bears and mountain lions wouldn’t need to find a new home in Sunland.” The use he spoke of is one of scale. An adult bear needs perhaps 20 square miles to survive; humans, of course, figure the equation in people per square mile, not the other way around.

Already, the Sunland man noted angrily, the crayfish and bullfrogs of the Tujunga ponds are virtually gone, sacrificed to visitors to the wild places, who leave in their stead food wrappers and dirty diapers and traces of illegal fires.

This bespeaks a carelessness that can be as damaging as any slaughter, the attitude that the outdoors is simply another man-made amusement, a CityWalk with genuine dirt and animal spoor, lacking any reminder that nature doesn’t shut down at 11 p.m. so the cleanup crews can erase the signs of your presence for the next day’s trade.

Few among the thousands who trek the canyons and trails must be guilty of all this; but only a few rogue bears need show up on the nightly news for us to believe ourselves as prey and not predators.