This bear, known to wildlife authorities, had been relocated to the mountains after appearing in Chatsworth on Tuesday, but it didn’t hang there for too long. Tagged as Yellow 2291 by the wildlife authorities and fitted with a tracking collar, the bear recently turned up in another tree in a Sylmar neighborhood over the weekend. It eventually came down from a tree in the northern San Fernando Valley.
Bear’s Recent Adventures and Monitoring
This is the same bear spotted Tuesday south of the 118 Freeway in Chatsworth. The bear was filmed climbing a chain-link fence and up a tall tree before being tranquilized and taken away in a pickup truck back to the mountains. A few days later, the bear took another trip down the mountains to Sylmar.
The female bear is estimated to be between 3 and 5 years old and well-known to wildlife authorities. Authorities said she was trapped in the area of Claremont, about 50 miles from Chatsworth in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, last month and taken to Angeles National Forest. Since then, her movements have been monitored along the 210 Freeway corridor and into the Malibu area with the help of a tracking collar.
Jessica West, an environmental scientist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the collar data on bears’ behavior was exciting. “She actually has had some of the most interesting collar data that we’ve ever seen,” Jessica West, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told NBCLA last week. “She’s just wandering. It might be a little more typical to see that with a male bear, just because being male, they do tend to have, you know, bigger home ranges.”
Attempts were made to trap the bear in the Northridge area on July 1 before it trekked to Chatsworth. After being sedated, it fell from a tree onto mats provided by a nearby gym.
California’s Rising Black Bear Population
The population of black bears is also on the rise in California, estimated between 25,000 and 30,000. This is very high compared to the last couple of decades. Black bears have coats in colors such as blue-gray, brown, or black. They love to eat plants, insects, nuts, and berries — and will gladly pick through the contents of a trash can. If the pickings are slim in their natural habitat, they’ll probably look for food elsewhere, placing them in Southern California’s foothill neighborhoods.
The bear population is centered mainly in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and areas to the north and west; only a smaller percentage are in central western and southwestern California. The grizzly bear depicted on the state flag was native to California but has been extinct since the early 1920s.
About half of the state’s bear population lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and areas north and west. In contrast, an estimated 10 percent of the black bear population lives in central-western and southwestern California. Although the fearsome grizzly is featured on the state flag, it is no longer found in the California wild. The last grizzly bear seen in California was killed in the early 1920s.
