'Bad Seed Bears' : Experts Defend Bruins, Saying It's Their Nature to Go Where Hunger Leads Them

By DANICA KIRKA

Feb. 19, 1996 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

SANTA CLARITA —

The black bears’ “capture, transportation and release occasioned much comment in the local press and their introduction was generally approved. If they thrive, they will become a real attraction to the thousands of visitors who spend summers and weekends in the mountain playgrounds. Their comical, clownish appearance and actions are a never-ending source of amusement to youngsters and adults alike.”

--California Fish and Game Journal, 1933

Sixty-some years later, the descendants of those “clownish” bears transplanted from Yosemite to the mountains on the northern rim of Los Angeles--where they were previously scarce or nonexistent--have multiplied to the point where many suburban homeowners are more worried than amused.

The original 27 planted in the area have grown to an estimated 300, and their comical actions include clowning around in hot tubs and marinas, campgrounds and freeways.

But bear researchers reject any suggestion that they are “bad seed bears” because they are descended from the garbage-dump scavengers of Yosemite over half a century ago, bears spoiled by feeding off the easy pickings of civilization.

The tale of the bruins of outer L.A. goes back to 1922, the year Yosemite National Park librarians say the last wild grizzly in California was killed.

The mountains and valleys where Santa Clarita, the San Fernando Valley and other suburbs arose were originally the home turf of the majestic grizzly. Black bears shy away from their bigger, more aggressive cousin, so they probably avoided the area, biologists say.

But with California grizzlies extinct, except for the one on the state flag, the mountains were bearless. By the 1930s, hunters figured it would be nice to have rug-worthy game close at hand. The San Gabriels, the San Bernardino Mountains and the Angeles National Forest were still far enough from urban areas to warrant daylong excursions to the “wilds.”

So civic leaders persuaded the California Department of Fish and Game to transport 27 bears from Yosemite National Park to the local mountains, as described in the journal report above. By 1938, Yosemite’s records show that six more were taken to the Santa Barbara National Forest.

Southern California bear expert Glenn Stewart of Cal Poly Pomona believes the folks at Yosemite simply rounded up the bears that were closest at hand--the ones that frequented the feeding pits that park officials set up to attract bears for tourists to watch, a practice now long abandoned.

“You might call them nuisance bears,” Stewart said. “Those would be the easiest to catch.”

Soon, biologists believe, their numbers were supplemented by bears expanding their range by moving across the Tehachapis, down the San Gabriels and into the central coast mountain areas.

Either that, they quip, or the 1933 bear planting was the most successful wildlife release ever recorded.

But their origin has given rise to a myth that dogs local bears, as well as others throughout the state:

Because at least some--maybe most--of the local bruins are descended from the bears of the 1930s caught red-pawed in Yosemite’s garbage pits, their descendants either by genetics or training might be predisposed to look for food among humans.

The ursine myth has been debunked for years by Yosemite librarians, the California Fish and Game Department and assorted bear biologists. Instead of calling them “bad seed bears,” perhaps it is more correct to call them bears with bad reputations.

“It gets them kind of a black mark on their records,” Stewart said, chuckling as he considered the idea. “[But] we’re not suggesting that they inherited the tendency to hang around garbage.”

It may be a convenient theory to explain why bears and people tangle more these days, but bruin watchers say no way.

“Bears,” said Dave Siddon of the Wildlife Images Rehabilitation and Education Center in Ashland, Ore., “are nothing more than appetites and fur.”

Siddon and other experts say that any bear, when presented with the standard suburban garbage can, needs no previous training or heritage to appreciate it.

A bear would follow “a trail of marshmallows into downtown New York,” Siddon said. “Bears are omnivores. They eat everything. When they get into a beehive, they’ll even eat the bees.”

In fact, some biologists venture, the behavior of bears has not changed one iota as they adapt to ever-increasing human populations.

People, on the other hand, are changing quite a bit.

The growing environmental consciousness that became widespread in the 1960s has given greater status and respect to wildlife even as subdivisions push further into rural areas, said Gary Alt, a wildlife research biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

“A curious bear in the 1950s was a dead bear,” Alt said. Now, he said, people are more likely to reach for the phone book “and see what government agency deals with this problem.”

Even as human populations spread suburbs farther afield, bear populations have been healthy, said Robert Stafford, black bear program coordinator with the Department of Fish and Game.

In 1985, the state cracked down on poachers using bear-tracking dogs in the off-season. At the same time, it became illegal that year to sell bear parts--an effort to combat the illicit trade in organs such as gall bladders, which are prized by some practitioners of Asian medicine.

Add to that the human food supplies that have been increasing with new developments. More food makes fatter bears, Stafford said, and fatter bears have more cubs. In addition to the 300 or so bruins roaming the San Gabriel and San Bernardino ranges, there are about 20,000 statewide, he said. That compares to about 15,000 a decade ago.

“They are exceptionally smart,” Stafford said. “Which is why we have to make sure they don’t get into garbage in the first place.”

Stafford said that there were cases in the 1970s of Yosemite bears who began to recognize the distinctive shape of the Volkswagen bus.

“They learned that that shape contains food,” Stafford said.

Bear biologist Stewart has spent the better part of 20 years tracking bears in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains. Cal Poly Pomona graduate students under his tutelage write papers with titles such as “Denning Characteristics of Black Bears in the Mountains of Southern California.”

He has watched the bears’ increasing interaction with people and attributes it to a thriving bear population in areas near where new suburbs are being built.

“We’ve got development,” he said, and that means “more opportunity for contact between bears and people.”

One measure of the increasing contact between human and bruin is the number of permits the state has issued to homeowners to kill a troublesome bear. In 1985, there were 76 such permits issued. Only a decade later, there were 281 in one year.

Santa Clarita-area game warden Marty Wall didn’t even count the number of bear sightings reported to him last year. But he had to make four calls for troublesome bears in 1995, more than he’d made for the previous five years combined. He relocated two but had to kill two others that had grown too fond of garbage and might have attacked people entering the area.

So he wondered what the fuss was about when a bear was sighted near a Castaic campground a few weeks ago, prompting worried county park officials to order the campground emptied and closed for two days.

That bear ran away, after all.

“He wasn’t terrorizing campgrounds,” Wall said. “He wasn’t tearing up trash cans or anything.”

The brief brush with beardom so early in the year underlines the increasing tension between suburbanites and wildlife, even though there haven’t been many new developments in the area where this bear was spotted.

“That was just so much overkill,” said Stafford.

State officials, seeking a smoother coexistence between people and bears, are embarking on an outreach campaign to persuade homeowners to discourage bears in their neighborhoods.

To predict such incursions, state game wardens next month will embark on their first study of bears that wander from the wilderness into foothill communities such as Monrovia, Azusa and Pasadena.

Five bears that pop up in suburbia but cause no trouble, called “no-harm, no-foul” bears, will be given radio collars and relocated into wild lands adjacent to the suburban communities they have adopted, said James Davis of Fish and Game.

“We want to know how quickly they’ll come back to the community, if in fact they do,” Davis said.

Some of those new to the wilderness-fringe suburbs think that because the bears seem cute and cuddly, they should be encouraged to move in.

The bears aren’t looking for trouble. When confronted with people under most circumstances, biologists say, black bears would rather run than fight.

But bears can be very dangerous if they feel threatened, and should not be encouraged to live in areas with many human neighbors, Davis said.

“They think it’s neat until [the bear] slaps their dog or slaps them,” Davis said. “Those folks need to recognize that if they live near those foothills, those beautiful open foothills, they need to take some precautions to make sure that the wildlife doesn’t hurt them.”

These new homeowners, and indeed most city dwellers, don’t have the same sense of continuity with wildlife and hard-nosed appreciation of the relationship that our forbears had, says Baxter Black, a cowboy poet/philosopher and former large-animal veterinarian.

“There is no longer this connection with life, and therefore death,” Baxter argues. “And we see it mirrored in children in the way that movies are made. We’ll see movies where 1,000 people are killed and it never fazes them. Then along comes Bambi or Old Yeller and everyone weeps. . . . Some people have lost their perspective.”

Says Wall: “They think we’re [game wardens] like Marlon Perkins in ‘Wild Kingdom.’ It just doesn’t work that way. . . . The sad truth is that once an animal becomes habituated to a human food source . . . it’s really hard to get him back on the wild [food sources].”

Bear biologist Stewart can get misty-eyed when he learns the fate of some of the animals he studies.

In a lab crowded with preserved lizards, snakes and frogs and reeking vaguely of formaldehyde, the sprightly, graying academic threw back the closet door.

A gust of mothball fumes slammed him in the face as he reached into the darkness. Groping for a moment, he pulled out a dark fur, the fluorescent light reflecting the pelt’s sheen.

Like a carpet salesman struggling with a big sample, he held the pelt aloft and laid it gently on the display table.

Then he dragged out the blondish-brown coat of another bear. Game wardens permitted him to keep what was left of these “problem” bears for study, after they were shot for being unruly.

“I don’t like to see animals killed,” he said sadly. One was raiding beehives in Ventura County, he noted, just following its nature.

The increasing interaction of bears and people means bears have been getting lots of press recently.

Most famous of late has been Samson, the chubby male who wandered in from the mountains in 1994 and discovered a heated swimming pool and spa in Monrovia.

But even Samson illustrates the problems game wardens have once bears learn that humans produce edible trash. Samson was said to have learned the garbage truck routes in Monrovia and the times homeowners would put out cans for pickup.

Stafford says biologists were unable to move him back into the wilderness because it would have disturbed the habitat of other bears. Besides, they said, he would either use his homing abilities to figure out how to return or simply be a problem in someone else’s neighborhood.

“Once they’ve learned how to get to the gravy train,” Stafford said, “they’ll get to it all the time.”

Game wardens put Samson into protective custody after he ate a garbage bag and was agonizingly digesting it. He is now in the Rancho Cordova Wildlife Investigations Laboratory, awaiting the construction of a new home in the Orange County Zoo, scheduled to be ready before the month is out.

Yosemite ancestors or not, the bears are following an age-old impulse to find food that is unlikely to change.

Observers such as Baxter Black are betting that some human behavior will also never change, pushing more human housing into ursine turf.

“Whether you’re complaining about bears in your backyard or Wal-Mart in your backyard, it’s nothing but civilization marching inexorably on,” he said.

“Bears are like Kmart employees,” offered Black, who is known for his homespun reminiscences on National Public Radio.

“They’re domesticated, but they’re not tame. You can see them crossing the aisles, but by the time you get up to them, they’re gone.”

And that, all the bearly wise agree, is how it should stay.

* RELATED STORY: B13

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bear Country Guidelines

As the populations of black bears and man in Southern California increase, so does the likelihood of man and bear crossing paths. Bears like to forage or human food and trash--endangering themselves and their human neighbors. Once a bear becomes a destructive nuisance, it may be destroyed. Here are guidelines for people who live where the suburbs meet bear habitat, drawn up by the California Department of Fish and Game to ensure the safety of both man and bear.

At Home:

* Never feed a bear.

* Store garbage outside in bear-proof containers.

* Don’t leave pet food outside.

* Move bird feeders inside at night.

* Clean and store barbecue grills

* Don’t put fruit or melon rinds, meat or grease in a mulch or compost pile.

In Camp:

* Don’t eat or store food inside tent.

* Don’t sleep in clothes worn while cooking or eating.

* Store food in car trunk or suspend it at least 10 feet above ground between limbs too small for a bear to climb.

* Don’t keep toiletries inside tent or wear perfume or cosmetics.