Animal Aly

Beary cool!

The Santa Monica Mountains just got their first black bear family in decades, three cubs in Topanga Canyon raised by a mother called BB-14, who crossed four Los Angeles freeways to get there and then crossed them all over again every time officials trapped her and hauled her back out.

Her full designation is Yellow 2291, named after the color of her GPS collar. The National Park Service calls her BB-14, the fourteenth black bear the agency has tracked since 2005. She was estimated at three to five years old and weighed 175 pounds when she first walked into a trap in suburban Claremont on May 31, 2024. The trap was not set for her. California Department of Fish and Wildlife human-wildlife conflict specialist Jessica West said they were not expecting to see this when they captured this non-target bear. She had wandered into someone else's problem and became the most closely watched bear in Los Angeles.

CDFW released her into a remote area of the Angeles National Forest and assumed she would stay. By June, her GPS data showed her traveling along the 210 Freeway corridor. She crossed it. She moved through the Santa Susana Mountains and crossed the 118. She passed through the Simi Hills. She crossed the 101. She appeared in Sylmar, Calabasas, and Malibu. She walked onto the Pepperdine University campus. She was a 175-pound black bear moving through one of the most heavily urbanized landscapes in North America, at night, across freeways that carry a quarter million vehicles a day, and nobody saw her until the GPS told them where she was.

In July 2024, she got stuck in a tree in Chatsworth. CDFW responded, tranquilized her, and relocated her to the Angeles National Forest a second time. Within a month, she was back in the Santa Monica Mountains. The behavior is called homing. Some bears, when relocated, simply return. They cross whatever is in the way and go back to where they decided to live. BB-14 had decided to live in the Santa Monicas, and neither the freeways nor the relocations changed her mind.

The year before, a four-year-old male black bear designated BB-12 had attempted a similar journey. He roamed 138 square miles across three months in 2023, covering much of the same fragmented landscape between the Angeles National Forest and the coast. He was struck and killed by a vehicle on the 101 Freeway. NPS wildlife biologist Jeff Sikich, who tracks large carnivores across the Santa Monica Mountains, noted the parallel. The freeway that killed BB-12 is the same freeway that BB-14 crossed twice and survived.

In January 2025, BB-14 denned in a remote drainage near Topanga Canyon and gave birth to three cubs: two males and one female. CDFW conducted a den check in March and confirmed all three were alive and healthy. By May, doorbell cameras and trail hikers were spotting them along creeks and trails in the Santa Monica Mountains. In October 2025, the family was photographed in a backyard tree in Encino, south of Ventura Boulevard, less than a mile from the Santa Monica Mountain ridge. Neighbors watched from their driveways.

There are no known male black bears in the Santa Monica Mountains. BB-14's mate is believed to be a male living in the Angeles National Forest, roughly 30 miles and four freeways to the east. She crossed that distance at least twice before denning. Whether the male also crossed the freeways to reach her, or whether she mated before her final crossing, is unknown. What is known is that her cubs are the first bears born in the Santa Monica Mountains in living memory. They are growing up in a mountain range surrounded by ten million people, learning to forage in a landscape that burned in the Palisades fire, and their mother found her way there by walking across the most dangerous obstacle course on the continent and refusing to stay where anyone put her.

Source: California Department of Fish and Wildlife / National Park Service / KTLA / ABC7 / Los Angeles Times / Wikipedia.