Mother bear, two cubs are new family on Monrovia block

Manuel Rodriguez and his two boys spent most of Sunday with a furry new family that recently moved into their Monrovia neighborhood.

It was Rodriguez’s kids who first spotted the bear and her two cubs. The boys were walking to a local park and turned back home when they saw the trio ambling down the hill.

An hour later Rodriguez was keeping an eye on his 5-year-old son through the kitchen window when the boy hurried inside and told him there was a bear pacing up and down the grass in the backyard. A TV news crew came and went before the mother bear left her spot under a tree.

It was just the Rodriguez family’s latest encounter with bears.

After more than a decade living in Monrovia, bears have become as much a part of Rodriguez’s life as taking out the trash on Mondays. But he and his family have become particularly acquainted with this family of three in recent weeks. Unlike most bears, this family worries him because they seem so unbothered by humans.

“This is probably the most aggressive bear I’ve seen in the 12 years I’ve been here,” he said Monday. “We’ve learned that if you walk out there, they really want nothing to do with you. They usually just walk away. But she’s different.”

Rodriguez estimates he’s seen the mother bear at least five times in recent weeks and said that each time, she has behaved erratically -- pacing, huffing and breaking into backyards. To Rodriguez’s admittedly untrained eye, the bear and her cubs appear thin and “lethargic.”

“My concern is that she’s going to get aggressive toward humans,” the father of two said.

But Janice Mackey, a spokeswoman with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said there are many possible explanations for the bear’s behavior. This bear and her cubs were recently pushed back into open space by wardens, “which may explain why they are acting a little aggressively toward humans,” she said. There may also be a dominate male in the area that the mother sees as a threat to her cubs.

“A bear coming down to a residential area in Monrovia is not unusual,” she said.

For the mother bear, keeping the cubs close could be the smartest thing she does. Officials try to avoid tranquilizing mother bears with young because “there’s always an inherent risk with using drugs,” Mackey said. The department treats all bear calls on a case-by-case basis, she said, so it’s not clear how they would handle the bear family if asked to deal with them again in the future.

Monrovia city officials said they received multiple calls about bears and cubs over the past weekend. But because the bears aren’t tagged or collared, it’s impossible to know for certain whether residents are spotting the same set of bears, Mackey said.

Either way, Alan Sanvictores, a Monrovia police captain, repeated an age-old maxim on Monday: “Don’t feed the bears.”

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