Posts
Black Bear, Uninvited, Moves Into California Man’s Crawl Space
Ken Johnson has tried noisy tactics to encourage the 550-pound houseguest in his crawl space to leave. He is not sure it’s working.
In June, Ken J. Johnson discovered the underside of his house in Altadena, Calif., was in curious disarray. Bricks were dislodged. The access frame around the crawl space was ripped apart. So he installed a security camera and waited to catch the mysterious vandal in the act.
Last week, he finally did.
Mr. Johnson, 63, woke up at 7 a.m. on Nov. 25, checked the footage, and discovered he had a 550-pound furry houseguest.
A black bear had taken shelter under his house.
“It was the first thing I saw when I woke up and looked at my phone,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “The camera had gone off and a bear had crawled out.”
For more than a week, the bear has noisily taken over his property in Altadena, a foothill community northeast of Los Angeles, Mr. Johnson said.
He has watched the bear’s antics from a wary distance, smelled his musty scent through a vent in his house, heard him hiss “like a dragon” and stood back as he stomped and ambled down the sidewalk. He has seen him rummage through garbage, and make the crawl space his own.
“He was going in, tearing it up, pulling the bricks,” he said.
So far, the bear has done everything but leave for good, attracting curious onlookers and local journalists. Mr. Johnson has sought advice from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and law enforcement officials. He wants to block the crawl space with sandbags, but he is concerned about the repercussions of an eviction.
“Yesterday, I was thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want him to come out,’” he said. “What if he gets panicked? They can run 35 miles an hour. He seems to be more and more irritated.”
Mr. Johnson, who owns a graphic design and photography business, is just the latest person to grapple with a member of the Ursidae family, as sprawling urban areas encroach near bear habitats, with their homes and businesses, and unsecured garbage cans, becoming sources of food.
Recently, black bears appeared behind the counter of a South Lake Tahoe ice cream shop; lumbered into a private patio to drink a White Claw in Florida; and sneaked into a California zoo. That bear pressed its nose against the enclosure with the (other) bears inside.
In California, bears have been known to seek shelter in homes’ crawl spaces, where they nestle for the winter in a cozy, dark alternative to dens in the wilderness.
“The San Gabriel Valley has always been an area with a lot of black bear activity,” Cort Klopping, a spokesman for the fish and wildlife department, said in an email.
He said the department was recommending a course of action for Mr. Johnson that involves keeping a safe distance while monitoring it by camera. Once the bear emerges, Mr. Johnson should block the space and place rags soaked with ammonia around it to discourage the bear from returning, Mr. Klopping said.
“This approach is the first and most common step in keeping bears away in these incidents and has a high success rate,” he said.
The bear in Mr. Johnson’s crawl space, whose weight is estimated at 550 pounds, is a recurring visitor in Altadena. It was trapped there by wildlife department scientists in February and released in the Angeles National Forest. After the Eaton fire early this year, officials used chicken, sardines and apples to lure the bear because utility crews were uneasy about doing restoration work with the animal nearby.
Mr. Johnson’s tenant has also made a previous appearance at his home. It once peeked through a window at him as he sat and watched television, he said.
“His head was on top of the window looking in,” he said.
The male bear has a tag imprinted with the year 2021, he said.
“Actually, to date I know three people who have had this bear in their yard or crawl space,” he said.
The BEAR League, a California-based nonprofit organization that educates people on how to coexist with bears, says its teams respond daily to help homeowners evict bears from crawl spaces during the winter. The animals are attracted to the cavelike, dry spaces, like the mother bear and cub who settled under a house in Lake Tahoe in February.
The league recommends blocking crawl spaces with special electric mats or chasing bears from spaces with loud noises.
That is a tactic that Mr. Johnson has pinned his hopes on, as he veers between creativity and resignation in dealing with the bear that has made itself at home directly under his kitchen floor.
“It has been in there, I think, since Sunday night at 9:20,” he said. “I haven’t even heard him from inside. But I am afraid to put a camera there to see. If I put my cellphone on a selfie stick and put it in there, then I am out a cellphone.”
He has tried to dislodge it by using a leaf blower in the kitchen, putting the washing machine on spin cycle, blaring an air horn and blasting a radio into a vent that points down through the house, he said. All that did was scare his cat, Boo, who scrambled in fear onto the tallest shelf he could find.
For all he knows, Mr. Johnson said, the bear is still underneath and will come out on his own time.
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
