New Neighbor Is Found Unbearable

A 2-year-old black bear ambled casually through the manicured lawns and rose gardens of Agoura Hills for several hours Tuesday, startling residents but apparently causing little trouble before animal control agents shot it with a tranquilizer dart and loaded it into a truck for a ride out of suburbia.

The mild disposition of the 175-pound male prompted California Fish and Game officials to spare it the fate of some bears who wander into residential areas: euthanasia.

A “no harm, no foul situation,” Fish and Game spokesman Steve Martarano dubbed the incident. The bear, he said, “just kind of wandered into the wrong place.”

About 11 a.m., Mary Davis was having lunch with her great-granddaughter and readying the youngster for kindergarten when she happened to look out the window toward her backyard thicket of olive trees.

“I just glanced out and I saw the face of this bear,” said Davis, 76. “I thought I was seeing things.”

She called to her son, Gary Davis: “Call 911. There’s a bear in the yard.”

Gary Davis, 51, who was working in the office he keeps at his mother’s house in the Passageway Place subdivision, darted to join his mother and daughter in the living room and have a look for himself. Yes indeed, Gary Davis said, a small bear with brown fur and a black muzzle was meandering about the yellow daisies and tomato plants in the backyard garden. He called 911.

The animal looked like “it was more confused than aggressive,” he said later.

Calls to 911 rolled in as authorities began tracking the bear.

When Tal Navick, 37, picked up her 9-year-old daughter from school a few hours later, a bear in the area was the schoolyard scuttlebutt. Navick rushed to her home on Mainmast Drive to be certain all the doors and windows were closed. As she darted through her house, she peered into her backyard -- and there was the bear.

“I was just very surprised,” Navick said. “But my daughter was scared. She cried.”

Monica Preciutti heard the news while working in the after-school program at Yerba Buena Elementary School, where officials ushered all the students inside. Shortly before 3 p.m., Preciutti went home, only to find she was locked out of her house. She sat down in her yard in the Passageway Place subdivision to wait for her husband to come home.

Law enforcement and Fish and Game officers had been slowly drawing a cordon around the young bear. Unknown to Preciutti, they soon had it in their sights -- right around the corner from where she was sitting.

Toting tranquilizer guns, they approached and told her: “Just wait over by the cars [across the street] because the bear’s in your backyard,” Preciutti recalled a short time later. “And I said, ‘Oh, well, thank you very much.’ ”

Preciutti saw the officers drag the bear out in a sling, but “I didn’t get a good look at it. I didn’t want to get too close.”

Fish and Game wardens said they were not certain what might have driven the heavy-coated mammal down from the cooler Santa Monica Mountains into the suburban lowlands.

However, Martarano said, “They’re coming out of hibernation and they’re looking for food.”

Officials have not counted the number of bears in the Santa Monica Mountains, but the Department of Fish and Game says the number is small, perhaps only a few dozen.

The agency says there are 25,000 to 35,000 black bears in California, the only species in the state.

As urban sprawl has encroached on their habitat, animal officers have at times been forced to kill bears that habitually eat garbage or destroy property, because they are presumed to have lost their wild nature. To avoid having to do so, they encourage people not to feed bears.

“We have a saying: ‘A fed bear is a dead bear,’ ” because they end up being euthanized, Martarano said. “It’s highly unfortunate for the bear when that happens. Bears are slaves to their stomachs. They’ll rip off a car door if they get a scent of a Twinkie inside.”

By Tuesday evening, the bear was bound for a remote area of the Santa Monica Mountains, authorities said, presumably far from Twinkies.

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Times staff writer Eric Slater contributed to this report.