He knows them by heart. Their appearance, their habits. For some, their names. “Yesterday, a mother bear, Maddie, came with her two cubs into the pool, a little before 7 a.m. The other day, they were in front of the house, in the parking lot”describes Brian Gordon, 48 years old, owner of a house visited, at the end of summer, “between three and five times a week” by American black bears (whose coat can be brown). Brian Gordon does not live in an isolated place in the middle of the forest: he lives in Monrovia, a residential suburb of the Los Angeles metropolitan area (United States). His house is located at the end of a leafy subdivision, a short drive from shopping areas. He most often observes the bears with thirteen cameras, which he installed, with his companion Rick, all around the house. He regularly posts images of plantigrades taking a dip in his swimming pool on an Instagram account, created in 2024. Guaranteed success: the intrusion of wild life into the heart of urban life is a fascinating spectacle, all the more so when it concerns bears, ambiguous creatures of childhood and stories, both harmless cuddly toys and figures of danger.
In Los Angeles, these bear incursions into cities are not anecdotal. They bear witness to a phenomenon observed in multiple American cities: the growing presence of wildlife in urban areas, in this country where cities are spread out horizontally and rub shoulders with large natural spaces.
In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, encounters between humans and bears are “increasingly frequent since the 2010s, and in particular over the last five or six years”says Wilson Sherman, doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), specialist in interactions between bears and humans. The reasons? Increasing urbanization and a growing bear population in the surrounding mountains – there are an estimated 1,600 bears in this part of Southern California. In addition to bears, Los Angeles residents regularly encounter coyotes, raccoons and opossums. Thanks to his cameras, Brian Gordon was also able to notice that mountain lions and bobcats regularly prowled around his house at night – but more rarely than bears.
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