California is expecting a return of grizzly bears

The grizzly bear on California’s flag disappeared a century ago in the Golden State. Now a group of tribes and environmentalists are urging the Legislature to study whether it’s possible to bring them back.

Grizzlies once lived in most of California. As many as 10,000 may have wandered before the gold rush. They were so common that when the California settlers tried to create their own nation, they called it the Bear Flag Republic.

Settlers systematically exterminated the animals and they became extinct by the 1920s, leaving the smaller black bear as the only surviving bear species.

A century and another 34.5 million people later, the Democratic senator from Inglewood. Laura Richardsonis Senate Bill 1305 will task the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with creating “a road map that assesses whether and under what conditions grizzly bear reintroduction is feasible and advisable.”

The measure does not provide for funding to conduct the study, which could be provided by a future legislature or an outside group. And even if it were funded and its recommendations implemented, it would be several years and help from a potentially hostile federal government before the claws of a grizzly bear would cut a mark in California.

The hypothetical nature of the proposal did little to ease tensions over the prospect of one day returning the continent’s second-largest land carnivore to the nation’s most populous state.

On one side are organizations representing rural communities, hunting organizations and animal breeders.

They argue that it is absurd to consider reintroducing aggressive 800-pound bears to California’s degraded, drought- and fire-prone landscapes. Rural areas, they say, are already overwhelmed with conflict with mountain lions and growing black bear and wolf populations.

“I just don’t think our California today is ready for a grizzly bear,” Republican Assemblyman Heather Hadwick told the Parliamentary Committee on Wildlife last month.

Hadwick’s vast rural area in northeastern California has faced years of stress from predators, particularly wolves, that kill livestock and terrorize small towns.

Environmentalists, tribes support

At least 40 tribes, conservationists and animal welfare organizations support the bill, according to CalMatters Digital Democracy Database.

They say bringing back the state’s largest top land carnivore will improve the ecosystem and right an ecological wrong from California’s past.

“I see the ways in which my homeland suffers from the loss of iconic species like the grizzly bear, and that loss remains in our hearts and in the weakening of a millennia-old bond,” Tiana Williams-Clausen, Yurok Tribe Wildlife Director, told lawmakers last month. The Yurok and Tejon tribes are sponsors of the bill.

2025 Study by a coalition of tribes, ecologists and university researchers found that Yurok lands on the North Shore, as well as the nearby Klamath Mountains and Trinity Alps, could be suitable grizzly bear habitat.

The study also highlights the southern Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, as well as the Transverse Mountains that stretch from San Bernardino County to Santa Barbara County.

It is estimated that the habitats can support between 424 to 1,713 grizzlies, although it recommends introducing a population of 25 grizzlies to begin with. Grizzlies can be found in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington.

Supporters of the proposal say grizzlies would help California’s ecosystem. Giant omnivorous bears till the soil while scavenging for food, helping to restore coniferous forests, prairies, and oak savannas, reducing the danger of wildfires.

Grizzlies also serve to check overpopulation of prey. Grizzlies may reduce human conflicts in California with black bears because grizzlies compete for food with their smaller cousins. Grizzlies also kill and eat black bears.

“The loss of grizzlies may have been one of the factors contributing to this overgrowth (of the black bear population),” Williams-Clausen said in an interview.

Grizzlies and the urban-rural divide

Supporters’ arguments appealed to Democrats who control the Legislature.

Only Republicans voted against the bill, which is set to be considered by the House Appropriations Committee when the legislature returns on Aug. 3.

Richardson did not return an interview request for this story. The measure’s Democratic co-sponsors are Southern California lawmakers representing mostly urban areas.

This spring, one of the co-authors, Sen. Henry Stern, told the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water that a mountain lion recently attacked one of his neighbors, so he understands rural concerns about predators.

However, learning to coexist with them is just part of living in a beautiful state filled with wildlife, Stern said.

“We want to live in California where — that risk — there’s some beauty in it,” said Stern, who represents the Sherman Oaks area of ​​Los Angeles. “Having that element in our lives instead of just sterilizing our landscapes and nature so that nothing else is a risk… I think it makes us more human to have wildness in our lives.”

Elizabeth Washoe, a Modoc County Indian, hears such talk from townspeople and rolls her eyes.

“There’s nothing I’d love more than to see grizzly bears on the beach in Santa Barbara chasing rich people,” she said.

But she said that would be cruel — to the bears.

Like many people in California, Washoe people still honor grizzlies through ceremonial bear dances, but she said it’s not “ethically right to bring them back.”

She hopes lawmakers will consider what life would be like for grizzlies they capture and bring to California, where they would face a landscape vastly different and eight times more populated than when the bears last lived here.

“The bears have no say in this,” Washoe said. “Where they are, they’re living a pretty good life, and we’d take them and put them here in a landscape that’s changed so drastically since the last time bears really lived a good life here. … I understand the point of it, but it seems selfish to me.”

State wildlife officials are cautious

The California agency that will be in charge of studying the reintroduction of grizzly bears doesn’t seem eager to get down to business.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife, which has not taken an official position on the legislation, does not comment on pending bills, spokesman Peter Tira told CalMatters this week. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office also declined to comment.

But there is no indication that the department’s position on grizzlies has changed since a former spokesman told a reporter in 2023 that wildlife officials were barely able to deal with existing conflicts with predators.

“Putting another predator in a state where we’re going to have to manage and come up with some kind of program to understand what happens when a grizzly attacks a person or kills livestock doesn’t seem feasible to us,” spokesman Jordan Traverso said at the time. Alta newspaper.

The department is chronically underfunded and staffed. A legislative analysis of this year’s bill notes that Fish and Wildlife has enough money and staff to meet only 38 percent of its existing obligations. The department “will not be able to absorb the demand this roadmap would have on staff time and resources,” according to the analysis.

David Bess, who recently retired as the top law enforcement officer overseeing California’s game wardens, said the department is “getting bogged down” with much of it trying to manage conflicts with predators that are already around.

“I just don’t see where the department even has the capacity to do it,” Bess said.

Trump’s great proposal

Now the administration of President Donald Trump has added a new wrinkle to the debate.

Earlier this month, the administration issued a proposed rule change which seeks to bring back grizzly bear management to the states, even though the bears are protected under the US Endangered Species Act.

Environmentalists fear Trump’s proposal would allow conservative states to begin killing grizzlies to appease ranchers and big game hunters.

The proposed federal rule would not affect California’s grizzly proposal because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be responsible for any reintroduction program, said Andrea Zaccardi, legal director of carnivore conservation at the Center for Biological Diversity, which supports Richardson’s legislation.

But having the bears in environmentally friendly states like California could prove beneficial if other states begin aggressively killing them, she said.

“We hope they will be managed more responsibly there,” said Zaccardi, whose organization has unsuccessfully petitioned the feds to bring grizzly bears back to California.