Should California’s Rewilding Include Grizzly Bears?

“Are there any true grizzly bears now in California?” William Randolph Hearst, the young owner of the San Francisco Examiner, asked his enterprising reporter, Allen Kelly, one May day in 1889. Bay Area papers the previous year included the headlines: “Chased by a Grizzly,” “A Farmer Killed by a Bear,” and “An Unknown Man Horribly Mangled by a Grizzly Bear.” Hearst loved these blood-soaked tales. His own paper was full of vicious battles between grizzlies and hunters—readers relished them—but many of these were nostalgic accounts of encounters 20 years before or distant reports from Montana. Did these legendary beasts still roam the Golden State?

“Undoubtedly there are,” Kelly said.

Hearst, skeptical, answered, “That may be so, but nobody can find them.” Then the mercurial publisher, known for publicitystunts, added, “Now, do you think you could find one?”

Kelly was up to try. With a few companions, he set off into the California mountains to bring back a live grizzly. And months later, to everyone’s surprise, he did.

Battered and exhausted, but still awe-inspiring, the grizzly, dubbed “Monarch,” attracted crowds to San Francisco’s Woodward’s Gardens, where he was kept in a cage, and then to a spot in Golden Gate Park still called Monarch Bear Grove. Over 22 years, he served as mascot of the Examiner (“Monarch of the Dailies”), was featured in books, and represented the idea of nature’s ferocity to cosmopolitan San Franciscans. He wove himself into California’s idea of itself. Part of his attraction—thousands flooded to see him—was his rarity. One of the last. One of the only. After he died in 1911, museums displayed his taxidermied pelt.

A little more than a decade after his death, the last grizzly in California was spotted in the wild. There had once been an estimated  50,000 in the Lower 48 states (before there were Lower 48 states), and some clung to portions of the Rockies and North Cascades. But the 10,000 that had lived in California, ranging from beaches to high-mountain meadows? After years of shooting and poisoning, those grizzlies really were gone.

Now, more than a century after this last sighting, Californians are asking themselves a version of Hearst’s question. Not whether there are any true grizzlies in the state. But rather, should there be?

Researchers have pinpointed possible habitat in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Trinity Alps, and Los Padres National Forest. And this past summer, the state legislature debated a bill that would have laid the groundwork to bring the grizzly back.

The suggestion to restore the grizzly is part of a wave of desire among many Californians to bring wild animals back to their original habitats. California is the most biodiverse state in the nation. It has committed to preserving this wealth of plant and animal species by, among other things, a 2020 “nature-based solutions” governor’s executive order that prioritizes biodiversity conservation. And public interest in “rewilding” has increased. As a result, using ever-improving reintroduction methods, Californians have returned Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep to parts of their historic range, Yosemite toads to their namesake national park, tule elk to the Sierra Nevada foothills, beavers to Plumas County on the ancestral lands of the Mountain Maidu people, and the San Francisco forktail damselfly to Glen Canyon Park, among many, many other species.

But the grizzly would be the most daunting. An apex predator represents the apex of reintroduction ambitions. The bear has outsize symbolism, and also, it is just outsize. As a result, reintroducing grizzlies is hard. Certainly logistically. Dangling a bulky animal from a helicopter and dropping it into the wilderness will always be a challenge. But politically, too. Importing large carnivores, known to attack humans, raises ethical considerations that the damselfly doesn’t. In California, wolves have reintroduced themselves and dragged controversy in their wake. A planned grizzly reintroduction would make the state more culpable.

And that makes lots of people nervous.

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Bringing back the grizzly has long been a tantalizing dare. Unlike many extirpated animals, the grizzly persists in the popular imagination. It’s everywhere in California—on the flag, the state seal, on UC Berkeley merchandise. It lingers in a healing ceremony, a museum exhibit, an ancient skull, refusing to be forgotten.

For many years, though, the idea seemed impossible or was treated as a joke. In 1986, an Associated Press story’s headline read “California Can’t Bear Thought of Imported Grizzlies.” A 1995 headline in the Record Searchlight: “Grizzly’s Reintroduction in California Unlikely.” An op-ed in the Sacramento Bee in 2014 declared, “Plan to Reintroduce Grizzly Bears is Unrealistic.” 

Everyone to whom I have mentioned a possible grizzly reintroduction—former players at a reunion of the Berkeley High soccer team, an ecologist colleague, passengers on BART, my mom—has met the proposal with a furrowed brow: “Why?” A bear is more dangerous to humans than the wolves already causing so much concern. They really wouldn’t want to meet one on the trail. And California is packed with people.

Peter Alagona, a professor of environmental history at UC Santa Barbara, encountered all of these attitudes as he researched the history of the grizzly in California. But the more he talked to scientists, historians, and conservationists, the more he wondered—what if he took the idea seriously? In 2016, Alagona and others formed the California Grizzly Research Network to explore the question. Is a reintroduction possible? What would it look like? You can only enact what you can imagine.

His conclusion, after digging into the data, publishing paper after paper, and traveling to see Ursus arctos (called “grizzlies” in the Lower 48 and much of Canada, but “brown bears” almost everywhere else their subspecies are found, including in Europe and Asia and along the Alaskan and Canadian coasts) to examine how they lived: “Although this is going to be counterintuitive to many, many folks, California is actually at a better place to have this conversation now probably than at any point in the last 100 years.” 

Though some might think of the landscape as hot, degraded, and crowded, Alagona is optimistic. Reintroductions are returning ecosystems to species richness unimagined not long ago. Stretches of the Klamath have been undammed. Fields of native bunchgrasses and wildflowers bloom in formerly bare patches. DDT is banned. Extractive industries—logging, mining, ranching—are at much lower levels than in previous years. Potential grizzly habitat abounds.

In terms of possible food for the bears, Alagona says, there is no shortage of options. Globally, the bears subsist on all kinds of things. They claw salmon out of icy rivers along Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Graze on acorns and bilberries in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain. Chew wild rhubarb in the Gobi Desert. Scavenge carcasses in the Arctic. “These animals live in a huge range of ecosystems, eat a lot of different things, and there’s still a lot of food left around for them,” Alagona adds. California’s exploding numbers of black bears are evidence. They eat similar food and don’t seem to have trouble finding a meal.

This February, state senator Laura Richardson (D–District 35) got the ball rolling. The California Grizzly Recovery Assessment Act would have determined if returning the bear was feasible, creating a “road map” report due in 2030. As part of its justification, the bill highlighted that for Californians, “the grizzly bear holds enduring cultural, historical, ecological, and symbolic significance.”

The bill ultimately died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee in mid-August. The state is struggling to manage conflicts between humans and other predators, like mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, and black bears, committee chair Buffy Wicks said in an email.

“Before the state takes steps toward potentially reintroducing another large predator, I believe we need to make sure CDFW has the resources and capacity to responsibly manage the wildlife already here and protect both communities and wildlife,” Wicks wrote.

While the California Grizzly Recovery Assessment Act didn’t pass, it prompted serious consideration of a once pie-in-the-sky idea, and its language was notable. In addition to touting the cultural importance of grizzlies, the bill declared the “recovery and restoration” of native species to be part of the state’s mission. Like the bear, it is part of California’s sense of itself.

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In the late 1900s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) staged one of the most dramatic reintroductions of all time in California. The California condor hovered on the brink of extinction, the result of exposure to lead ammunition, DDT, cyanide baits set for coyotes, and other hazards. Only nine were left in the wild by 1985. These were taken into captivity, where eggs were swapped out so the females would lay eggs more than once. Humans wearing condor hand puppets raised the bonus young. In 1992, the first two were set free near a Southern California cliff. It seemed like a miracle of audacity. Now more than 200 condors glide throughout the state on their nine-foot wings. 

The condor work was at the start of a new era for the science of moving animals for conservation purposes. 

Previous reintroduction attempts had often been scattershot affairs. Earlier in the 20th century, managers might set free problem animals or exotic pets that didn’t work out. Many reintroductions failed, including three releases of captive brown bears into Poland and Italy. Sometimes animals starved or hung around humans too much or vanished into the woods without establishing a population. And even with efforts that succeeded, the process wasn’t recorded and animals weren’t monitored. It wasn’t clear what worked and what didn’t. These attitudes added up to “let’s put some animals out there and see if they survive,” researchers wrote in Conservation Biology in 2007.

As the 1990s unspooled, managers and conservationists began to take a more scientific approach. It became clear that more and better reintroductions would be needed in the face of climate change and habitat loss, and the IUCN Reintroduction Specialist Group (now the Conservation Translocation Specialist Group) developed “best practices” and kept a database of reintroductions to document procedures. Over time, observations and experiments led to a better understanding of which ages and sexes of animals were best to release, and what time of year might be conducive to them finding food and prompt them to stay. GPS tracking and DNA analysis allowed scientists to see which animals were moving where and determine the best release sites. Advances in science and technology unleashed an era of reintroductions globally.

The only successful grizzly bear translocation in the United States took place in the remote Cabinet Mountains of Montana and Idaho at the dawn of this new era. In the early 1990s, when the Cabinets had an estimated 15 grizzlies, only one of which was known to be female, managers brought in four young female bears from British Columbia. Over the following years, they imported more from other parts of Montana, bringing the Cabinet Mountain population up to about 22 in 2021. And the new bears served their purpose. Most of the grizzlies now in the Cabinet Mountains are related to the imports.

“If we hadn’t put bears in the Cabinets, they would have disappeared,” says Chris Servheen, the USFWS Grizzly Bear Recovery coordinator from 1981 until his retirement in 2016. In that time, Servheen weathered many grizzly bear battles. He learned a lot about bears, learned a lot about people who have strong feelings about them. The first releases in the Cabinets involved countless meetings, assessments, setbacks, the creation of a citizen management committee, revisions. They scrapped a plan to have black bears foster grizzly cubs and, in response to public input, changed the initial release from eight bears to four. “Conservation for grizzly bears is a long-term process, and it only succeeds with constant steady pressure,” he adds.

Intervening years have offered more data, making eventual success in California more likely, according to Alagona. Reintroductions of brown bears in the Pyrenees in France and in the Italian Alps have taken hold. This “science and art of capturing animals, moving them safely to new places, and getting them sustainably established has come a long way,” Alagona says.

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In the chilly storage room at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, bones from California grizzlies don’t even take up two full shelves. Chris Conroy, the curator of mammals, tells me that by the time anyone thought to collect bear parts, they were practically gone. The museum’s first director, Joseph Grinnell, rushed to gather what he could, wheedling and bargaining with those who might have a prized skull, but the collection is sparse. An old cranium the color of driftwood. A box of teeth. A box of claws.

“Here’s Monarch,” Conroy says, pulling a heavy wooden crate from under the bottom shelf. Inside is a jumble, each piece numbered. Conroy points out that a few are clearly spongy with arthritis. The bones are a rusty orange. They were buried in Golden Gate Park before they were unearthed at Grinnell’s request. Monarch means a lot to people, even now, and the crate gets a stream of visitors. Artists have come in to make casts of the bones, then gilded them. One group asked to take the bones into another room, then held funeral rites.

What is this evidence of? What can be gleaned from these remains besides a rather sad record of our efforts at domination? Well, maybe quite a bit. 

Along with bones of other California grizzlies, the skeleton of Monarch was tested for isotopes of various foods to see what grizzlies ate. Because of reports of livestock raids and attacks on humans by ursine behemoths, California grizzlies were long thought to be particularly large and fierce. But a 2024 study revealed that the tales of bloody-mouthed monsters were overblown. Bears were smaller than the giants screamed about in bold headlines and, before the influx of people with cows and sheep in 1542, they ate mostly plants. Early diets were only 10 percent animal. Even after Europeans arrived, the diet was only 26 percent animal. Similarly, DNA testing on Monarch and others indicated that bears around Yellowstone were close relatives and might make good candidates for reintroduction.

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One of those who spoke in favor of the California Grizzly Recovery Assessment Act in recent hearings was Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok tribe’s wildlife department. The Yurok, along with the Tejon tribe, had coauthored the bill.

Williams-Claussen has experience with reintroductions, both the hard work and the excitement. After more than a decade of planning, the Yurok tribe released the first California condors in the northern part of the state in 2022. She watched the birds explore this new territory, learned their individual habits. And this spring for the first time, satellite transmitters on the condors’ wings showed two taking turns staying at the nest and flying off to find food—a pattern indicating an egg that needs tending.

Eventually, the couple started hanging out together again, off the nest. This egg didn’t hatch. But still.

“Even if they didn’t make it this year, the fact that they tried was an incredible step toward recovery,” Williams-Claussen says. And recovery is the goal. “When you are missing these species, no matter how small, there is damage to the system,” she adds. “Whether it’s condors, or grizzlies, or sea otters, or beavers.” Grizzlies played both an important ecological role—digging that aerates the soil, dispersing seeds, adding nutrients to the forest by hauling fish on land—and a cultural one. The bear was considered a relative and partner in maintaining the prairie, Williams-Claussen says.

When Alagona first approached her at a rewilding conference with the idea of bringing back the grizzly, she had doubts. She had been raised with the idea that this wasn’t possible. Her first concern was for the bears that might be released to find their way in the modern redwood terrain. “I love it, but I know that the forests have been decimated,” she says. “The habitat has changed a lot since the California Gold Rush and our landscape was rewritten.”

There are other worries, too. California is hotter. Salmon runs have collapsed. Translocations can be hard on animals. Though there was not even a budget for the assessment or reintroduction, some argued money might be better spent on restoring habitat or creating pathways between existing populations. And California grizzlies would be isolated. Most bears in northern Washington, Idaho, and Montana can disperse and meet mates across international boundaries, but California grizzlies risk inbreeding and needing constant human-mediated influx of new bears—a grizzly island.

“We don’t want to try and manage islands,” comments Servheen. Managing connected populations is the goal.

Two other translocations have stalled. A proposal approved in 2000 to bring 25 grizzlies to the Bitterroot Mountains on the border of Idaho and Montana hasn’t moved a single bear. Neither has a plan to annually bring three to seven bears to the North Cascades Ecosystem in Washington state for five to 10 years, approved, after a contentious series of public meetings, in 2024. 

Unfortunately, Servheen says, grizzly reintroduction has become another casualty of polarization. “When I started working on the recovery program, in 1981, everybody was working together, and there wasn’t a political party in favor of grizzly bears and a political party that wasn’t. Everybody was on board. Right now, the greatest threat to grizzly bears is politicians,” Servheen says.

Williams-Claussen listened when cattle ranchers expressed concerns about lost calves. She talked with First Nations people in Canada who lived alongside grizzlies. And she remembered a tribal leader referencing the Yurok identity as “world renewal people” and “fix the earth people,” people with a responsibility to maintain and restore balance. She realized that bringing back the grizzly was a tough but necessary conversation.

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The impulse to foster native ecosystems is nowhere more evident than in the Presidio, a former military outpost turned national park site. One June Saturday, volunteers meet at a Presidio office to brush up on butterfly names before heading out for the annual count. Mist hangs over the meadow outside the old barracks, licking at the tall grass. In the past two decades, ecologists have reintroduced Pacific chorus frogs, western pond turtles, three-spine stickleback fish, and California floater mussels, among other species. No grizzlies yet, though they were historically in the area. But a poster details plans for a pilot release of California quail this fall—they recently disappeared from the park—and a white board has questions scrawled on it like, “What is our tolerance for loss?”

Today, among the skippers and swallowtails, the volunteers will be looking for three more reintroduced species: the variable checkerspot (a black cape of wings speckled with white dots and edged with red ones), the California ringlet (a dusty, furry butterfly—a “weak” flyer that had to be helped over the Golden Gate Bridge), and the silvery blue (the closest living relative of Xerces blue, which went extinct when the sand dunes that made up San Francisco were converted to roads and houses).

“Why reintroduce insects?” I ask Phoebe Parker-Shames, a Presidio wildlife ecologist, as she gathers butterfly nets and heads into MacArthur Meadow. Compared to a grizzly or a wolf or a beaver, they seem to have little landscape impact.

“There’s a lot of reasons,” she says. She points out the ecological one—that many songbirds rely on protein-filled caterpillars throughout the year. Species hatch at different times on different host plants; a diversity of insects means food at every season. “A full and complete ecosystem requires a full and complete butterfly community,” she says.

But she also highlights another reason, a philosophical one, one that is perhaps at the heart of many reintroduction impulses, whether butterflies or bears: “They were here, and we’re the reason they’re not.”

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Not far away, in Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences is raucous on a summer morning, nowhere more so than the “California: State of Nature” exhibit that showcases local ecosystems—deserts, forest, cities, the coast—all under a great blue whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling.

One darkened corner, with a mesh top and a background of deep green, is a little quieter. Monarch stands in a glass exhibit case. Here is a piece missing from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology—the pelt. He is surrounded by samples of grizzly bear food—lichen, pocket gophers, rain beetles. Videos show grizzlies going about their beary lives, cubs fumbling through a meadow, standing in a rushing river. Monarch’s expression is complex: the mouth seems to be smiling, but the eyes are melancholy. It has the battered look of old taxidermy—a little worn around the muzzle.

In the Monarch display, a small boy rushes to press his hand against the metal cast of a grizzly footprint, and the man with him says, “You’re not a very scary bear.” 

A girl puzzles out the signs describing extinction. “Aren’t there still bears?” she asks a woman who might be her grandmother. “How did they come back?” 

A teacher shepherding a large group pauses at the grizzly. “It’s really human-looking.” 

One woman’s face lights with recognition, and she drags her friend over to read the sign next to Monarch. “What they did to this bear . . .” She shakes her head.

There was debate about including Monarch, according to Paige Laduzinsky, the lead content developer for the exhibit. Is his story too upsetting for little kids? Some thought Monarch should be respectfully buried. But he is one of the elements of the exhibit people remember most, she says, and it’s a chance to rewrite the Gold  Rush–era narratives of bears as terrifying monsters. It’s a complex legacy.

“I always saw Monarch as this symbol of loss, but also the symbol of hope for what could happen for California’s ecosystem,” Laduzinsky says.

Despite the demise of the grizzly reintroduction bill, the discussions about the state’s past and future are worth having, Williams-Claussen says. “It took us 14 years to bring back condors,” she says. “This is not a fast process. And so whatever it takes, we want to come to the right decision. And so I’m looking forward to investigating and figuring out what that right decision is.”