American black bears have lived in California for a million years, but they have never had a year quite like the last 12 months. The two bears that showed up on the Santa Barbara South Coast this spring are part of a bigger story. We can expect to see more of them, and we should start preparing now.
Black bears are wonderful creatures. They are extremely intelligent, but most are shy and mellow. They are superb parents, can live up to 30 years, and vary in color from jet black to bleach blonde. Black bears evolved in forests, where they developed monkey-like climbing skills. This explains their habit of seeking safety in the trees, rather than standing their ground, when confronted by a threat — such as a pack of ferocious dire wolves during the Pleistocene or a crowd of chatty college students during the Anthropocene, which is what happened at UC Santa Barbara on the evening of April 17.
Black bears are omnivores that will consume almost anything that counts as food. You would, too, if you knew you weren’t going to eat between Thanksgiving and spring break. In most wildland ecosystems, however, up to 95 percent of a black bear’s diet comes from plants and insects.
The black bear is one of eight living bear species, and the only one that currently resides in California. It is not the most widespread — this honor goes to the brown bear, which in most of North America we call the grizzly, a subspecies of brown bear — but it is the most numerous. By 1900, black bears in the United States had been decimated, but since 1970, they have rebounded. They now live in at least 40 of 50 U.S. states, 11 of 31 Mexican states, and 12 of 13 Canadian provinces. California is home to between 50,000 and 70,000 black bears, the most of any state after Alaska. Their total population is at least 900,000, around three times as many as all of the world’s other bears, combined.
Black bears are both old and new to Southern California. They lived here for hundreds of thousands of years, but they seem to have disappeared around 25,000 years ago, during a dry period at the height of the last ice age. In 1933, a decade after Southern California’s last grizzly bears met their end, 27 Yosemite black bears were released into the mountains north and east of Los Angeles. “Their comical, clownish appearance and actions,” wrote one state official, will be “a never ending source of amusement to youngsters and adults alike.” The black bears that live in Santa Barbara County today trace their genetic roots both to these Yosemite bears and to bears that migrated here from the southern Sierra Nevada.
Few predicted that black bears would be so successful in our wildland-urban interfaces. In the 1980s, when they first started showing up in the foothill suburbs near Los Angeles, wildlife officials confidently announced that they were flukes. These communities are now at the forefront of efforts to coexist with the dozens of black bears in their neighborhoods.
California’s national parks used to be hotspots of so-called black bear conflicts. Park employees and visitors had spent decades training the bears to associate humans with food. When the bears became aggressive, officials often responded with the death penalty. In 1999, the parks launched a coexistence program that focused on human behavior and sanitation. In Yosemite, the number of incidents plummeted by 95 percent, from around 1,600 per year in the 1990s to around 80 in the 2010s. A 2014 study found that Yosemite’s black bears had switched back to natural diets after decades eating junk food.
The parks have demonstrated the techniques that work for coexisting with black bears. Now, the question is: How can we implement these methods in communities where people live? The answer has more to do with civic culture than with science or management. Which brings us back to the past 12 months.
Things aren’t going great. Last June, California saw its first-ever human death associated with a black bear. In August, officials in Mammoth Lakes — once considered a model of black bear coexistence — killed and dumped the body of a beloved local bear named Victor. This generated national news, local outrage, and a rebuke from the Bishop Paiute Tribe. In November, The New Yorker’s 1.3 million readers were treated to a sensationalistic feature article about California’s black bear mess.
In April of this year, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife published its first new Black Bear Conservation and Management Plan in a quarter-century. This was a unique opportunity to place our state at the forefront of efforts to coexist with black bears. Polls have shown that this is what most Californians want. Unfortunately, the plan doesn’t propose new policies or programs of any kind. It also doesn’t mention the department’s once-promising coexistence program, which was canceled, after just two years, during the 2024 state budget cuts. The plan uses the word “hunt” 225 times, “conflict” 54 times, and “coexistence” only once.
Residents of California communities with black bears are now mobilizing from the ground up. Groups like the North Bay Bear Collaborative are going beyond just filling gaps in services that the state is unwilling or unable to provide. They are beginning to articulate a new approach to participatory stewardship, which brings diverse people together in local civic groups. Imagine a Fire Safe Council for wildlife. These groups partner with state and federal governments whenever possible, and go beyond them whenever necessary.
It is not clear whether, a decade or two from now, Santa Barbara will be a hotspot of black bear activity, like Sierra Madre or the Pine Mountain Club. What we do know is that the two bears that wandered into the urban South Coast this spring carried a message. The time to start thinking and acting, in our community, to promote safe and healthy shared habitats for people and black bears is now — before the bears arrive in greater numbers.
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