Features

After following a trail of footnotes, I can tell you this much about the last victim of a grizzly bear attack in Berkeley: he was killed sometime in the 1860s in Strawberry Canyon, and a woman named Mrs. Parsons, the aunt of a Frank Armstrong who worked for the Schmidt family, made his shroud. 

I know a bit more about the first grizzly killed by a European in our area. As recorded by Father Juan Crespi in 1772, it was shot by Spanish soldiers on the banks of Strawberry Creek near the west side of what is now the UC campus to provide meat for an exploring party from Monterey. Monterey was where European and grizzly first met, in 1602; the chronicler of Vizcaino’s expedition saw the bears feeding on a beached whale. 

The coming of the Spanish disrupted a long equilibrium between grizzlies and humans. Native Californians regarded the great beasts with a mixture of respect and fear, attributing their powers to shape-shifting werebears and malign “bear doctors.” The Indians hunted grizzlies for their pelts and claws (for ceremonial use), and sometimes for food, although grizzly meat was taboo for the Yurok, Maidu, Pomo, and other groups. But they didn’t make much of a dent in the bears’ numbers. 

Despite the increase in human firepower, the Spanish and Mexican years were a good time to be a California grizzly. The abundance of livestock, especially the cattle whose carcasses were discarded after being stripped of hides and fat, fueled an ursine population explosion. By the time of the Gold Rush, grizzlies were turning up in all kinds of inconvenient places. There was no room for them in the new California, and they were shot, trapped, and poisoned to extinction. The last grizzly in Alameda County was killed in 1866; I haven’t been able to determine where. Some hung on into the twentieth century in the Santa Ana Mountains and the southern Sierra, with the last credible sightings in Sequoia National Park in 1924. 

What started me thinking about the fate of the California grizzly, and led me to read Tracy Storer and Lloyd Tevis’s 1955 book, was a recent manifesto by a group of biologists and environmentalists—big guns like Paul Martin, Michael Soule, Dave Foreman—published in Nature. It was a call for the re-wilding of the American West, the reintroduction of the megafauna we lost 13,000 years ago, or their next of kin—restoration ecology on the grand scale. Martin was the author of the Pleistocene Overkill theory, positing that the mammoths, ground sloths, and their contemporaries were killed off by Paleoindian hunters, and he feels our species has an ethical responsibility for redress. 

That could involve introducing African lions, Bactrian camels, and Asian wild asses, near relations of extinct North American species; maybe even cheetahs (although the North American cheetah was closer to the mountain lion than to the living African and Asian cheetah), and African and Asian elephants to replace the ecoystem services once provided by mammoths and mastodons.  

Martin and his co-authors had the Great Plains in mind for their Pleistocene Park. But California has its own lost megafauna, with one major player that was around a lot later than the Pleistocene. Why not bring back the grizzly? 

Apart from the obvious qualms about having another dangerous carnivore—omnivore would be more accurate, given grizzlies’ fondness for acorns and bulbs—next door, you might object that there’s no California grizzly gene pool left, and bears from Yellowstone wouldn’t be quite the same. Recent genetic studies, though, suggest that’s not the case. 

In Susan Snyder’s Bear in Mind, a splendid book from Heyday, along with the photographs of Seth Kinman’s grizzly-bear chair and the grizzly effigy made of prunes, there’s a map drawn by the early-20th-century biologist C. Hart Merriam. It shows the former ranges of what Merriam regarded as the state’s seven species of grizzly. The ones in the East Bay would have been Ursus colusus, which also inhabited the Sacramento Valley; then there was U. mendocinensis north of the Golden Gate and U. californicus south of it, and the four others. 

Taxonomists—biologists who name and classify organisms—come in two flavors: lumpers and splitters. Lumpers draw the boundaries of species and other units broadly, splitters narrowly. C. Hart Merriam was the king of the splitters. Based on variations in teeth, claws, and pelt, he recognized 84 species of grizzly and brown bears in North America. That’s full species, as in Homo sapiens. Later authors boiled this down considerably, uniting all the big brown bears in Europe and America into Ursus arctos and relegating the grizzlies to the subspecies U. arctos horribilis. 

More recently still, biologists at the University of Utah and the University of Alaska looked at the genetic structure of North American brown and grizzly bears by comparing mitochondrial DNA, the stuff we all inherit from our mothers: a favorite research tool because it doesn’t get reshuffled by sex like the rest of the genome, has a high mutation rate, and is invisible to natural selection. This group came up with four lineages of bears. The most distinctive was found only on the Admiralty Islands off the southern Alaskan coast; two others had wider ranges in mainland Alaska and northern Canada. The fourth lineage, or clade, included all the grizzlies from southern British Columbia down to Yellowstone. The oldest grizzly/brown bear fossils in the New World date to 50,000-70,000 years ago, but the four clades seem to have diverged between 245,000-700,000 years ago when the ancestral population still lived in Asia. Although only living bears were sampled, the extirpated California bears would have been part of Clade IV.  

So the California grizzly has gone from being a complex of seven species to a local population of a subspecies—maybe not even what would be considered an Evolutionary Significant Unit; no sturdier or more golden than other North American bears. Which means that Yellowstone or Glacier Park bears would make fine surrogates, if anyone is interested in bringing some in to, say, the Hamilton Range or the Carrizo Plain. Never mind the Great Plains: re-wilding begins at home. Probably not in Strawberry Canyon, though.