By Mary O’KEEFE
Note that residents at this meeting were not identified due to privacy issues.

Since the Station Fire in 2009, bears have been seen throughout the Crescenta Valley but especially in the areas of Whiting Woods and Glenwood Oaks. Due to the increased number of bear sightings, and more aggressive behavior displayed by the bears, neighbors held a meeting last week at which officials were invited to hear complaints and concerns and give some guidance on what residents can do.

There appear to be two bears, one tagged and one not, that roam the neighborhoods during all hours – both day and night. The bears enjoy digging through garbage, eating fruit off trees and then taking a dip in backyard swimming pools.

Most in the area remember Meatball, the bear whose fame grew as he ate meatballs and McDonald’s Happy Meals, that had entire neighborhoods following him on social media. Meatball was looked upon more as a domesticated bear than a wild animal, and his story is a very unusual one for most bears.

“Me and Meatball go way back,” said Lt. Marty Wall, California Dept. Fish and Wildlife, at the recent bear meeting. “I was the one who caught him –all three times.”

Meatball had been tranquilized twice and taken back into the Angeles National Forest, but each time he came back.

“The first time I let Meatball go it was on Vetter Mountain Lookout (in the Angeles National Forest),” Wall said. “He was back in less than a week.”

He was captured for the third and last time, and taken to a preserve near San Diego.

“The third time I caught him it was in a covert trap. He fell for a Happy Meal,” Wall said. “So yeah we moved Meatball a couple of times and look what happened … he came back. Because Meatball had such a following he got [the attention] and a facility. That is pretty rare for a bear. In 24 years [I have been with Fish and Wildlife] I got the L.A. Zoo to take one bear.”

Meatball ended up at Lions, Tigers and Bears in Alpine near San Diego. Fundraisers helped build him a bigger habitat and he now is housed with other bears. But, as Wall stated, this was not the norm.

Wall added some might see his department truck driving off with a tranquilized bear in the back and think he is driving the bear a long distance. In fact he has to follow a policy that limits how far he can take a bear.

“And that is not very far,” he said.

Many think that Meatball was docile but the rumor that he entered a garage and ate spoiled meatballs from a broken freezer is not exactly what happened, according to the resident who first encountered the soon-to-be famous bear.

“There were rumors we left the door open and that we had rotten meatballs. None of that was true. He just came and busted down the doors [of the garage and the refrigerator] in the middle of the night,” said the resident.

“[Bears] are incredibly strong and their nose tells them what to do and where to go,” Wall added.

He said all it takes is a small section of a door or window to be opened, enough for the bear to get its toenail in, and it can rip anything apart.

That started the residents at the meeting talking about their encounters with the two recent bears.

“He ripped my screen door and went into my store room, which has no food in it [only] bicycles, toys and tools. So I replaced the screen door,” said another resident. “The next one he just nudged open, so now I have closed the glass [on the doors].”

She said that she has added dowels on her windows and doors to allow them to open only about six inches so her family can get a “bit of air.”

“If there is a crack as big as a toenail [bears] can get in,” Wall reminded the audience.

“So now we are in our home with no air? Or we can’t even open any doors? We aren’t allowed to open any doors or windows because the ‘bear is more afraid of us.’ I am so sick of hearing that line,” she said.

“Everybody is going to have to figure out what you can do for yourselves,” Wall responded.

“You can’t remove the bear?” the resident asked.

Wall said each bear cannot be removed because it will just come back. Residents said they wouldn’t mind getting some reprieve from the bears’ visits but Wall said there might just be more bears that show up.

Rebecca Barboza, fish and wildlife biologist, was also at the meeting. She said the bear visits that CV residents are dealing with now was a Monrovia issue 10 years ago.

“They were getting hammered by bears and they didn’t know what to do. Now the bears have come here looking for more food,” Barboza said.

One way that Monrovia seemed to deal with the bear issues was by having residents work together in a variety of ways that included using locking garbage cans and reducing the number of fruit trees.

There are two factors that may be contributing to the increase in the number of neighborhood bears.

“Over the past 25 to 35 years the bear population statewide has more than tripled,” Barboza said. “And all of these animals are urbanized, and the females teach the cubs how to live off garbage or how to live off persimmon trees, and how to get Koi fish out of ponds. They grow up learning that. So if we take the bear and move it up into the forest it will just come back to what it knows.”

She added that for the first time in years there has been a sighting of a bear in Malibu.

Knowing why the bear sightings are increasing was not much comfort to the neighbors who voiced concern about safety.

One woman shared a story of a bear charging her early one morning. She was taking her son to work at about 4 a.m. one morning when she noticed a bear near her car. This was not unusual; she had seen bears in the area several times and had bears do damage to her home, but this time was different.

“He turned and looked at me then charged,” she said.

Luckily she had unlocked the car door. The minute she opened the door the bear stopped but did not turn away. She was shaking and couldn’t get her keys in the ignition and had used her cellphone to call her son … who didn’t pick up. The bear eventually turned around and walked down the street but the encounter had left a terrifying impression on the resident.

Another resident said that he too had been charged while he was in his garage. A bear was just outside the door and the resident began filming when the bear charged.

This was frightening to most neighbors but especially to parents of children. They are now concerned about letting their children outside to play or to wait for a carpool to pick them up and take them to school.

It was suggested to make a lot of noise to scare the animal away, but Wall said even with doing that the bear could get used to that noise and not run away.

“There are a couple of ways you manage wildlife; it is not like managing livestock or pets. We manage it through habitat modification or sometimes hunting works,” Barboza said.

The entire room reacted to the “hunting” suggestion. No one advocated killing bears, which was stopped in Glendale about a decade ago according to Barboza.

“What we have here is that we are providing [bears] with a very bountiful way of living,” she said. “These animals live 25 to 35 years in the wild and when they are adults they are basically solitary. Basically in the urban areas they have so much food the sows [female bears] can [give birth to] more cubs. And those cubs can live to adulthood and they are feeding on human food. They are not going to search out the forest; they are going to find more human food in urbanized areas.”

“So what do we do?” asked a resident.

“It is tough because they eat everything,” Wall said.

In the end, the residents felt frustrated that the bears could not be taken into the wild and did understand that it is a difficult situation. The majority did not want to hunt bears but admitted there had to be something done. Help with purchasing bear-proof cans, which can be extremely expensive, or removing fruit trees was needed from the City of Glendale and/or L.A. County.

Ultimately, the challenge will be to get everyone in neighborhoods to take the same steps to help reduce the “bountiful” supply of food. Hopefully the bears will then move to neighborhoods with garbage cans that provide easier access.

  Mary Okeefe