If you go hiking in Malibu Creek State Park this weekend, keep your eyes peeled for some new wildlife that seems to have taken up residence in the park. Cameras have documented the first black bear in the area in almost 200 years. The last time a bear roamed the Santa Monica Mountains was way back before the 1800s when grizzlies, now considered extinct in California, made their dens in the area.
As SCPR reports, researchers are not yet sure how this animal came to be in the park. Black bears like this one have been spotted in the nearby Santa Susana and San Gabriel ranges, but if this black bear wandered off from one of those groups, that would suggest it took a little stroll across the 101 Freeway to end up on the Santa Monica range side.
If that’s what happened, it would be consistent with trends we’ve seen recently the with coyote and mountain lion populations around Southern California who have risked cutting across freeways and populated areas to try to find food and water as it becomes more scarce in their original territories. In 2014, a bear was killed attempting to cross a freeway onramp.
California parks superintendent Craig Sap hopes that park-goers will bear with the new resident—pun intended—as she settles into her mountain home, telling the AP, “Let’s see what we can do to co-exist with it.”
Black bear populations have actually been on the rise in California over recent years. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates there might be as many as 30,000 of them wandering around the state’s forests. Of those 30,000, however, only about 10 percent live in the southern region of the state. Most of those are descendants of black bears who were dropped into the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains by a government range-expansion program back in the 1930s.
So if you are planning to head out on a hike anytime soon, here are some tips on what to do if you come across a bear.