Are Our Local Bears True Natives?

Well, yes and no. It’s complicated! Here’s the very unusual story of the history of bears in our area.

Going back to pre-history, we locally had the short-faced bear. It was a real monster, weighing a ton, as tall as a man while on all fours and up to 12 feet tall when standing. These bears could run 40 miles per hour. They ate the usual bear stuff – berries, etc. – but had a preference for meat. They’re considered the largest mammal carnivore ever, bigger than modern grizzlies. They fortunately disappeared 11,000 years ago with the end of the Ice Age and the arrival of man, who hunted them and competed for the same prey. (Imagine the early North Americans taking down those huge, fearsome bears with wooden spears!) The short-faced bear is one of the species we find bones of in the La Brea Tar Pits.

The short-faced bears were replaced locally by the grizzly bear and the black bear, which coexisted in our mountains and valleys. They loom large in the culture of our local Native Americans. With the arrival of the Spanish that changed drastically. 

In the 1700s, the big Spanish ranchos of Southern California raised tens of thousands of cattle – big slow meaty animals – and the more carnivorous grizzly bears feasted on them. As a result, the grizzly population exploded to the point where the more docile native black bears were pushed out, though they continued to thrive in Northern California.

The Spanish vaqueros hunted the fierce grizzly bears, even capturing them alive for the famous bear and bull fights in Los Angeles. The Arroyo Seco was a favored spot for capturing grizzlies. When the Americans took over with better firearms, the grizzly population decreased. By 1900, grizzlies were pretty much gone from Southern California, which left our San Gabriel Mountains bearless.

Meanwhile, up north in Yosemite the black bears were doing great, and were proving to be a major tourist attraction. In the 1920s and ’30s, “bear pits” were created and each evening hundreds of campers would gather to watch the show. Rangers piled trash in the center of the audience and several bears would show up to eat the trash and entertain the crowd. It was so popular the same thing was started in Yellowstone.

Rangers here in Southern California wanted a piece of that action for their campers as well. In 1933, they contracted to get a few of Yosemite’s trash-loving bears for us down here. One Southern California wildlife publication wrote, “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.”

A couple of truckloads of Yosemite black bears, 28 in total, were brought down and released at Crystal Lake, Santa Ana Canyon and Big Bear Lake – apparently just for our amusement. And amuse us they did! One of the bears immediately walked into downtown Chino, ate a few chickens and busted open some bee hives! It was probably looking for that free trash handout it was used to in Yosemite. The bear was captured and returned to the mountains.

The bears obviously did well as in less than a hundred years the handful of black bears grew to tens of thousands of black bears in Southern California – some of which had simply migrated south to fill the bearless void in the southern mountains.

As we encroach on the wilderness, those bears continue to amuse us today. We had “Glen Bearlian” or “Meatball” in the Verdugos, which had a penchant for Costco meatballs taken from people’s garage freezers. We had the recent mother and two cubs that caused CV High School to be locked down while they prowled the neighborhood. 

And my favorite: a guy in Montrose was surprised by a bear in his apartment complex. (On YouTube, look up “Texting Guy Almost Runs Into A Bear.”)

So there you have the bear facts. Our bears are natives, but not really, only kinda. You gotta love weird history like this!