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Police and wildlife officials were attacked for weeks with reports of exploding Sierra Madre’s home, destroying windows and slashing screen doors.
So the California Department of Fish and Wildlife decided to kill a 300-pound female bear, believed to be the culprit. State biologists installed the trap, and the bear quickly wobbled over it.
The bear was sedated and was later shot and killed last month after wildlife officials confirmed they had the correct bear. The bear also had blood on her legs.
After the bear was defeated, the intrusion descended, but Sierra Madre officials say their Urshin troubles are far from being resolved.
Bear, believed to be behind the spikes of Sierra Madre’s Home Break-in, walks along the street. Wildlife officials say a unique patch of fur on the bear’s back helped them identify it.
Sierra Madre, Claremont, Monrovia, and other communities just below San Gabriel Mountain are hotspots for human conflict reporting. Some say the Eton fire has made the situation worse, with the habitat driving a burnt bear in the neighborhood to seek food and water.
“They’re coming down with fires, weather, dryness and heat,” said said during Charles Kamchamnan of the Sierra Madre Police Station.
Over the years, local representatives have blown up the Fish and Wildlife Service with a life order, demanding that government agencies mitigate what they describe as a threat to public safety. But they say nothing has changed.
In fact, the state cut all the Southern California human and wildlife conflict experts last year after funding drier. Local leaders began debating what steps they could take themselves.
“We need to understand this before someone is seriously hurt or killed, and before people start taking measures in their hands and go hunting bears,” said MP John Halavedian (D-Pasadena). “We don’t want that, and I tell you, people are at a turning point.”
Sierra Madre covers just three square miles of winding hills, and some houses sit in the mountains. The prominent trails from Mount Wilson allow wildlife to walk directly into a community of 11,000 people.
What you should take with the bear remains a matter of disagreement. Some people are looking for stronger interventions, while others argue that people need to be better at securing trash and reducing other bear attractants.
Michelle Trem Bray car bumper stickers from Sierra Madre. Tremblay is the president of Bearlabors at Sierra Madre, a nonprofit organization that aims to keep bears and people safe through education.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
How it started and how it progresses
California has around 60,000 black bears, and the largest population anywhere adjacent to the US, but Black Bear is an incredibly recent phenomenon in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains.
In 1933, 27 bears in Yosemite National Park “drove them out” were loosened in Southern California, the Times reported. A four-legged graft, 11-legged furry was released near Crystal Lake, northeast of Sierra Madre, six were sent to Santa Ana Canyon, with 10 people being sent to Santa Ana Canyon.
People with deep local roots say the bear conflict has only become a problem in recent years.
At Sierra Madre, unbearable garbage is made into canned food. “There’s a lot of support for bears in the city,” Mayor Robert Parkhurst said. “There is a lot of interest and willingness to live with and coexist with bears, but we’ve started to see an increase in invasion.”
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
Sierra Madre City Councilman Jean Goss said that when he moved to the area in 1996, he was rare to see a bear.
In June this year, Sierra Madre saw a bear enter the house. There were 41 invasions that month. According to a presentation by Sierra Madre Police Chief Gustavo Barientos at the City Council meeting on July 8, the vast leap from the year recorded in 2023 has begun to seriously track the bear incident. There were 37 invasions throughout the last year, with 13 in June.
Residents of the city’s canyon area had wooden debris and bars stuck on top of the windows to prevent the bear from ripping, Mayor Pro Tem Krisin Lowe said at a special meeting. Her in-laws have installed a grid of metal sheets above them, marking “huge costs” for mitigation. City atty. Aleks Giragosian said last year that the local Bears learned to open the doors “like Jurassic Park.”
Black bear attacks are rare, but officials have expressed fear that someone could get injured as the bear’s run-ins increase.
Goth spoke of the instance two years ago when his son shot a hoop in the yard and saw the bear charging him. It was shocked by his neighbor who was making a fuss to drive it away. The Goth’s son became out of the way, and it ended up in another property where young children often play.
“What do panic animals do if they block the road or move suddenly?” he said. “There are a lot of things here that could potentially be wrong.”
During his 31 years at the Sierra Madre police, Kamchamnan recalls three incidents in which a bear attacked people, including hikers, who were attacked by two bears. In another example, a bear hurts the hand of a man who lives in the Chantry Flat area of Angeles National Forest. The inappropriate man tells Kamchamnan that he is trying to put a string on a large amount of creature.
Sometimes local police will scare bears from residents’ homes with air horns and projectiles that release stimulants similar to pepper spray, but they are legally limiting what they can do. Fish and wildlife are primarily responsible for managing huge mammals, calling for movement and euthanasia.
“Someone is taking a big risk by not taking this issue more seriously,” Goth said of the state’s wildlife officials at a July meeting.
CDFW spokesman Peter Tira said his agency has been working with local officials for many years to address the city’s bear issue.
“We want a healthy bear population that will stay in the wild and not conflict with the people,” he said. “So we’re all working towards the same goal.”
However, he said the money would not stop at the agency.
“The solution to conflict with humans depends on the individual and the community,” Tira said, adding that the key is to block access to garbage, pet food and fruit trees. “That’s not really that complicated.”
Tensions of simmering and troubles in fundraising
Sierra Madre City Council passed a resolution in 2023, demanding that the state’s wildlife agency amend the wrongs to manage local bears.
A year later, Los Angeles County supervisors called on the agency to create a regional approach to address human interaction, in order to protect Sierra Madre and nearby areas and hire more human and global conflict experts. Instead, state officials cited budget cuts and let go of all but one of the 13 conflict positions after the one-off funds expired.
The statewide program remains a statewide program that allows us to report incidents “go right to our biologists, go right to the nearest person who can address those issues.”
Some Sierra Madre officials pointed to an increase in Bear invasions as a result of the possibility that they lost conflict experts who served the city this year. They are not immediately relying on the state’s wildlife agency of more robust staff.
Sierra Madre Mayor Robert Parkhurst planned an August 8 workshop for the mayor along the hills to discuss what could be done. There were early stage discussions on creating intergovernmental authorities from various cities in the region and putting funds into funding local wildlife conflict experts.
But like the states, many cities face tensions. And creating such authority takes time and tests the patience of residents who are currently demanding action.
The Haravedian, former mayor of Sierra Madre, has not seen local authorities win the day with the Bears. He introduced this year a law called for CDFW to establish measurable performance targets to reduce bear encounters in San Gabriel Valley, requiring bears and others to be tagged and tracked after they entered the local neighborhood.
CDFW estimated that the effort would cost $3.7 million for fiscal year 2026-27 and $2.9 million for more than the next fiscal year. The bill died in the Congressional Approval Committee, but the Halabedians vowed to reclaim it in some way.
“There’s a long time to come up with the answer, and they haven’t come up with it,” he said. “So I think we need to have real principles and real fire under the department.”
Feeding hands
Humans have moved deeper into wildernesses where bears live, but urcid has also expanded to absent or rare areas. According to the state’s Blackbear management plan, most cases have increased with spatial overlap, along with most cases, including “a fascinating intersection of bears, trash, livestock and more.”
Sierra Madre resident Michelle Tremblay opens a locking trash can that will withstand her bears. She said a recent survey suggests that around 50% of residents are not latching them.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
During the recent spike in Sierra Madre invasions, the man had ruled out all rotisserie chicken on the grass to feed the Ravens, and Bear Lovers of Sierra Madre’s president is asking for the bears and people to be safe through education. Others in the community are dumping water to help coyotes, birds and “poor wildlife” stay high and dry in the Eton fire, she said.
Sierra Madre has special locking trash cans to stop bears, but Tremblay suggests that a recent survey she has conducted suggests that about half of its residents won’t latch them.
Enchanted by the Bears, Tremblay is torn apart by the way he deals with bears who have challenged the house but have not hurt their souls, for example. She hopes that bear experts come up with a non-fatal solution.
“They are such an important part of the ecosystem and nature, and now they are classified as conflict bears, so seeing healthy bears subdued is breaking my heart,” Tremblay said. “But I also realized I don’t want to wait until someone gets injured.”
During a walk in May, Tremblay found quite a bear on the hillside. It peered into her. She squealed the bear horns, but it didn’t respond. She then cried, and it left.
She didn’t take any photos. She never snaps a bear photo.
“When you see a bear, you’ll be soaked in those 15 or 20 seconds and marvel at how beautiful they are,” she said.
Then, if the bear is in her yard, she tries to scare it.
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