Doubly true for my neighborhood next to the San Gabriel mountain range in Southern California. It’s one of the few areas of the country that wasn’t historically part of black bear habitat. (Originally, Grizzlies had the area claimed.) Black bears weren’t introduced here until 1933, which was 46 years after my town was founded and a couple decades after my house was built. Now we’re absolutely crawling with bears, and it’s mostly working very well here. We’ve got painted bear statues all over town.
Edit to add: my son just told me that he saw three bears while on a bike ride yesterday, which is a lot even for our neighborhood.
