Black bears are omnivores and have a broad diet. In urban areas, they may raid trashcans and dumpsters in search of easy food.
“Bears are made of the same dust as we,” wrote the naturalist John Muir, “and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.” If Muir had lived in Los Angeles in 2012, he might have also written that bears eat of the same meatballs.
In spring and summer that year, a California black bear turned up at least three times in a Glendale neighborhood at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. His first appearance was at 3 a.m. in a home garage. The homeowner heard noises and opened the door, only to come face to snout with a four hundred-pound bear raiding his fridge, snacking on cans of tuna and Costco-brand meatballs.
Black bears aren’t technically native to the San Gabriel Mountains—they’re native to California but were introduced to this area by humans after grizzly bears were hunted out in the early 1900s. But this bear’s story is illustrative of the challenges facing wildlife in urban and urban-adjacent environments.
The bear came to be known as Meatball (some called him Glen Bearian). Officials from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife tranquilized him, gave him an ear-tag so he would be recognizable to other wildlife officials, then relocated him deep within the Angeles National Forest.
When he woke up, Meatball walked back into town, and the whole story repeated. Wildlife officials realized Meatball had become too clever for his own good.
Bears usually do a good job keeping to themselves, but in 2009, the Station Fire burned through quite a bit of quality bear habitat in the San Gabriel Mountains. Rather than explore new parts of the forest, bears like Meatball explored neighborhoods in Glendale and La Crescenta.
When bears (and other large carnivores) become too comfortable around humans, it’s usually a death sentence. There’s the danger of getting hit by a car, and the reality of getting caught by wildlife officials. Even when we try to relocate animals like Meatball to more remote areas, it’s nearly impossible to keep them from the irresistible scent of easy-to-find human food. Unless there’s a wildlife sanctuary with the resources to take them in, these animals are usually euthanized.
Meatball’s story ends on a happier note. On his third jaunt through Glendale, he was caught (officials baited the trap with French fries, a cheeseburger, and bacon) and sent to a wildlife sanctuary near San Diego. Meatball is thriving in his new home and eating much healthier these days—his favorite foods are avocados, grapes, and raw nuts.
Black bears are omnivores and have a broad diet. In urban areas, they may raid trashcans and dumpsters in search of easy food.
In heavily urbanized places like Southern California, animals have to compete with humans for food and space. It may seem like Los Angeles has a lot of green space, but these patches of more natural habitat are isolated, scattered across the landscape in small- and medium-sized pieces. Scientists refer to it as a connectivity problem—if these habitat patches aren’t linked somehow, animals have a hard time traveling safely between them and are more likely to wander across roads and highways, or venture into our neighborhoods.
Eating trash and raiding garage refrigerators aren’t the only ways animals try to survive in the big city. The best animal survivors in urban and suburban areas usually rely on one of two strategies: adapt or exploit.
Coyotes are shy about cities but clever about taking advantage of them. They have modified their schedules, coming out at night and rarely spending more than a few hours at a time in our neighborhoods. While we sleep, they roam the streets, gobbling up fallen fruit in our yards or rummaging through our garbage cans.
Cooper’s hawks, on the other hand, have truly embraced city living. They actively take up residence in Los Angeles, because it’s chock full of their favorite foods—tasty doves, sparrows, finches, pigeons, and other birds that backyard birdwatchers invite into gardens. It’s as if we’re setting the table and ringing the dinner bell.
Southern California poultry farmers, who mistakenly believed their chickens were threatened, used to shoot Cooper’s hawks. Eventually, the hawks stopped hanging out around humans—or were killed before they could raise chicks. But in the last few decades, after shooting them became illegal, Cooper’s hawks have realized humans aren’t a threat anymore. Today, they’re one of the most common birds of prey in Los Angeles, often seen perched in backyard trees scanning the urban forest for prey.
Peregrine falcons have also adapted to city life. In their more natural habitats, they nest on ledges along sheer cliffs. But cities offer a lot of substitute nesting sites—bridges and tall buildings with narrow window ledges. They like to eat the same prey as Cooper’s hawks, so the city has become prime habitat for them.
Then there are Vaux’s swifts (rhymes with foxes). Each spring and fall, thousands of these four-inch-long birds, each weighing less than a slice of bread, cruise through Los Angeles as they migrate between breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America.
Before Los Angeles was built up, these cigar-shaped birds would have rested in hollowed-out trees. When buildings replaced trees, the swifts didn’t seem to mind. Bricks provide enough texture for them to cling to, so now they catch their much-needed shut-eye in brick-lined chimneys. Walk through downtown Los Angeles between April and May while the birds are flying north, or between September and October when they’re flying south, and you may see one of the city’s greatest wildlife spectacles: thousands of swifts settling into a chimney or elevator shaft for the night.
After spending the day snatching up insects while flying, they arrive at their roosting site and spend a few minutes circling. Eventually, one bird decides to take the plunge and the rest follow. To the observer, it looks like hundreds of birds swirling into a funnel or being flushed down a drain. In just a few minutes, the show is over, and the birds are resting inside the chimney.
For many years, their preferred roost was at the downtown Chester Williams Building near the intersection of Fifth Street and Broadway. A few years ago, developers renovating the building capped the chimney, and the birds had to move their rest stop to the Spring Arts Tower at Fifth and Spring streets. As time goes on, the swifts will likely have to move again.
Think of urban exploiters as super-adapters. They haven’t just discovered a way to survive among humans; they truly thrive alongside us. The best examples? Probably the cockroach or the brown rat, but let’s go with someone local and a bit more showy. Meet the Allen’s hummingbird.
There are two types of this fast-flapping species: migratory and sedentary. The first kind migrates each year along the California coast, breeding from the Oregon border to Santa Barbara, and wintering on the Pacific coast of Mexico. But the sedentary type is the city exploiter—content to stay home all year long, they’re the fastest-moving couch potatoes you’ve ever seen.
Allen’s hummingbirds, once rare, are now common garden birds in Los Angeles. They take advantage of ornamental plants.
These green, red, and bronze-winged homebodies used to be found only on the Channel Islands off the coast. But sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, they turned up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Most ornithologists (bird scientists) agree they probably got from the islands to the mainland without any help from us. Once they got comfortable in Palos Verdes, they began to expand. Today, they live between Santa Barbara and San Diego and as far east as Riverside, and their range continues to expand.
Hummingbirds eat up to eight or nine times their body weight every day, and they’re happy to find lots of food in the city. When you combine hummingbird feeders in backyards with all the exotic, decorative flowering plants Angelenos like—Cape honeysuckle, eucalyptus, and the bottlebrush shrub, for example—Allen’s hummingbirds have the unending buffet their incredibly fast metabolisms demand.
Los Angeles was once home to Pacific tree frogs, California newts, Western toads, and California red-legged frogs. All these native amphibians declined rapidly as the area was urbanized, but none more dramatically than redlegged frogs. As recently as one hundred years ago, red-legged frogs, which are the biggest of all California’s native amphibians, were found hopping around creeks in Beverly Hills. But the last ones were spotted in the Santa Monica Mountains in the mid-1960s and the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid-1970s. Nobody knows exactly why they disappeared, but there are several likely causes.
Human-built reservoirs and urban ponds are one. These open, permanent water sites allowed the introduction of non-native fish and crayfish, which quickly learned to gobble up native frogs’ eggs, tadpoles, and even the adults—non-native bass and bullfrogs both love to eat red-legged frogs.
A frog-killing fungus called chytrid also contributed to the red-legged frog’s decline. The fungus doesn’t kill bullfrogs or Pacific treefrogs, but they can still carry chytrid around with them, spreading it to species vulnerable to the infection. Even red-legged frog populations that managed to hang on in mountain canyons while the valleys below urbanized couldn’t make it through the fungus epidemic.
There’s a glimmer of hope, though. While red-legged frogs disappeared from the Santa Monica Mountains, a few populations persisted in the Simi Hills. Biologists from the National Park Service have successfully relocated eggs from the Simi Hills to the Santa Monica Mountains, where they hatched tadpoles that grew into full-size frogs. As long as the small creeks where they were reintroduced remain protected (and free of non-native fish), the frogs seem able to take care of themselves.
Southern Pacific rattlesnakes tell a similar story. Once you leave the LA Basin and venture into the mountains, rattlesnakes are plentiful. Where there is chaparral, there are rattlesnakes—with one exception: the Baldwin Hills, near Culver City. There hasn’t been a single rattlesnake here for at least half a century. As one of the most persecuted animals in Southern California, they were probably killed off. Even as other snakes—like gophersnakes and California kingsnakes—found ways to survive, the Southern Pacific rattlesnake disappeared.
Most snakes are hammered by urban development, especially by trying to cross roads and becoming roadkill. But rattlesnakes have an added disadvantage: all too often, a hiker or homeowner comes across a rattlesnake and, rather than leaving it alone, he or she grabs a stick or a shovel and kills it. Most animals that disappear from the urban jungle suffer from indirect effects of human behavior, like habitat loss or pollution. The Southern Pacific rattlesnake is somewhat unique—a target of intentional human aggression.
All species are part of a bigger community. It sounds a little sentimental, but the truth is, in a healthy ecosystem, each species plays a role. In LA chaparral, mountain lions are the top, or apex, predators. They feast on deer, but also raccoons, coyotes, rats, mice, and probably the odd squirrel or two. Coyotes and foxes are called mesopredators, which means they’re medium sized, not at the top of the food chain, but still able to make a meal of rodents and rabbits.
Imagine what might happen if the mountain lions disappeared. Without any large predators, the mesopredator populations would go through the roof. Small herbivore populations (rabbits and rodents) would shrink, while large herbivore populations like deer would expand. The whole system would go a little nutty.
In some ways, urban wildlife communities are mixed up. Some plants and animals have been driven out of town, while others have discovered incredibly clever strategies for adapting. But rather than think of these animal communities as incomplete, it makes sense to think of them as new ecosystems entirely, with relationships that have never existed before (and often have not been well studied). The ecological frontier isn’t in a remote rainforest or deep ocean. It’s right here, at home.
