The California grizzly bear is prominently featured on the state’s flag despite disappearing due to overhunting more than a century ago. But, it could make its return to the Golden State under a new bill introduced in the Legislature.
Senate Bill 1305, introduced by Democratic State Senator Laura Richardson of Inglewood, would direct the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, to create a ‘roadmap’ to study the socioeconomic, ecological, and cultural impacts of reintroduction through “a scientific assessment based on the best available data.”
The department would need to consult with California Native American tribes and engage with communities to create the roadmap. It would also submit the plan to various budget and policy committees within the Legislature and California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Office by June 20, 2028. In the meantime, grizzly bears would be prohibited from reintroduction until the plan has been approved.
While there’s no guarantee grizzly bears could make a comeback, supporters of the legislation say it marks a key step in returning not only the inspiration behind the state’s iconic symbol, but the return of a deep cultural one as well.
Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department, said the loss of the California grizzly left a hole in the state as well as the tribal people who once coexisted with them. She called the prospect of their return “incredibly exciting.”
“On the one hand, California grizzlies were an incredibly important part of our cultures and our ecosystem, but in this day and age they are also something that’s incredibly complicated,” Williams-Claussen said.
The Yurok Tribe is a co-sponsor of the bill. The Tribe hasn’t taken a stance on whether grizzly bears should be brought back to California, but welcomes the process.
The bill has been referred to the California Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.
History of grizzly bears in California
Grizzly bears are a relatively new species to the California ecosystem, only arriving after the last ice age less than 10,000 years ago.
They inhabited many parts of California, but were primarily concentrated along the coastline, the valleys and the foothill woodlands.
“Grizzlies are incredibly adaptable. They're incredibly flexible,” said Peter Alagona, professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of “Recovering Grizzly Bears in California,” a 2025 feasibility study conducted for the California Grizzly Alliance. “They’ve got the most flexible diets in nature, probably, other than human beings.”
Alagona said grizzlies didn’t have to disappear in California and their subsequent recovery is a choice.
As the United States began to move westward following the California Gold Rush era, the grizzly bear population quickly diminished as a result.
Alagona’s study describes grizzly bear sightings in the state being so rare by the 1880s that it became a newsworthy event. In 1889, journalist Allen Kelly went so far as to travel from San Francisco to Southern California with the hopes of capturing a living grizzly bear, an excursion partially funded by publishing giant William Randolph Hearst.
Kelly’s attempts to trap a grizzly bear ultimately failed. He did, however, buy a captive bear named Monarch from sheepherders. He lived in different enclosures until 1911. Monarch is believed to be the last captive California grizzly. Researchers have used his remains for diet and genomic studies, according to the study.
The last confirmed sighting of a wild grizzly bear was in 1924 near Sequoia National Park, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The ferocious animal that once roamed the Pacific coast at 10,000 strong was driven to extinction in the state by settlers, miners, ranchers, and government agents. Today, grizzlies still roam in Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, and parts of Canada.
“[The grizzly bear] was symbolized as an icon in the state at the very moment that it was disappearing from the state,” said Alagona. “Then it became, for a long time, a closed book, a story that was over.”
The symbol of the “fading frontier” had vanished.
Cultural meaning of grizzly bears
The loss of the grizzly bear, known by the Yurok name Neek-wech, meant the loss of a deep cultural symbol for indigenous peoples.
“When you lose a species you lose a balance that has been developed over the course of thousands upon thousands of years,” Williams-Claussen said.
The Yurok Tribe viewed grizzly bears not simply as wildlife, but as signs of luck as well as teachers and relatives to be respected. Williams-Claussen said grizzlies were even referred to by the Tribe as “aunties.”
“I've got some fierce aunties,” she laughed. “That’s one of those little rules that you have in Yurok country is ‘don't talk bad about your auntie or she's going to hear about it.’ So you always spoke well of the grizzly.”
Grizzly bears taught the Tribe where to find food, how to move through the land efficiently, and how to understand and respect the ecosystem.
If you drive along Highway 101 going through the Klamath Reservation, you can still see references to the “golden bear” with four bear statues on the Klamath River Bridge.
“They were part of a way of life,” Williams-Claussen said. “We expected them to be there. We knew how to live with them. We knew how to talk to them. There's certain ways that you can communicate with a bear, whether it's a black or a grizzly. Those are all things that, if they should ever return, we're going to have to relearn and reapply.”
How could grizzly bears be reintroduced?
Since grizzly bears would be reintroduced into ecosystems they haven’t lived in for over a century, there are a number of factors to consider.
Algona said the models should consider the availability of food resources, the remoteness of their habitat, and the proximity to roads.
According to the “Recovering Grizzly Bears in California” feasibility study, there are three prime locations to reintroduce grizzly bears should lawmakers choose that path.
The biggest and best of the three candidates would be in the southern Sierra Nevada near Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. This is where some of the last grizzly bears were seen in California.
The Transverse Ranges is another option. This chain of mountains stretches from San Bernardino County to Santa Barbara County, though it would place grizzlies closer to human contact.
The final possibility is the state’s northwestern forests in Humboldt County and the Klamath Mountains, which is a biodiverse area where numerous rivers and canyons weave through a prairie system maintained by surrounding tribes.
“It really depends on policy, it depends on choices, it depends on the participation and engagement of the local communities, and so all of that goes into it,” Alagona said.
Community reaction
That conversation is already well on its way. The Yurok Wildlife Department and California Grizzly Alliance hosted two community meetings on Feb. 26 and 27 to gauge the response to a potential reintroduction.
“We started with first a laying out of the bill, and then kind of a reintroduction into the minds of the people visiting of who grizzly really was and what role they played and why they went extinct,” Williams-Claussen said of the meetings, which started out with curiosity before ending with positive note.
Concerns raised included safety risks to residents, children, and livestock especially given the recent issues surrounding the natural reintroduction of gray wolves. Wolves have been a nuisance for many ranchers in Northern California since the 2010s when the first wolf packs moved in from other states after their own near century long absence.
A UC Davis study found one wolf could cause up to $162,000 in direct and indirect economic losses. That equates to between $1.4 million and $3.4 million total.
However, Alagona said grizzly bears are a completely different situation from gray wolves with different patterns “both in biology and in their human relations.”
“Grizzly bears move a lot less than wolves. Wolves can travel for hundreds of miles in some cases and grizzly bears rarely do that,” Alagona said.
Male grizzly bears will search out their own territories while females will stick to where they were born, usually near their mothers.
“The population only expands at the rate of the females, which is pretty slow because they tend to be more homebodies,” Alagona said.
Thought to be deemed a distinct subspecies, Alagona said California Grizzly Bears are almost genetically indistinguishable from grizzlies currently in Yellowstone and Glacier National Park. Restoration efforts could be drawn from bears across Montana, Wyoming, and parts of Canada.
“If it ever happens, I'm going to be super interested to see how it really plays out and how grizzlies readapt to a place that they haven't been for 100 years,” said Williams-Claussen.
Ecological impacts of grizzly bears
Grizzlies offer several benefits as “ecological engineers,” according to Williams-Claussen.
Unlike black bears, which are prominent in the northwestern forest near the Klamath River, grizzly bears will push through brush to clear paths and are incredible diggers.
“People look at their big scary claws, but if you actually look at them, they've got this really cool groove down the middle of them because they're shovels. They're digging through the dirt,” Williams-Claussen said. “I think that they're going to be a really great partner in reestablishing these prairies that we used to have.”
Those claws are also used to strip bark off trees and break branches to remove lower vegetation, essentially creating a firebreak.
“These are the exact things that fire departments in California are telling us to do right now to increase fire resilience in forests,” Alagona said. “Grizzlies were doing that on the landscape on a large scale for thousands of years. They don't do it now.”
Impact on a new generation
Researchers are quick to point out that any attempts to reintroduce grizzly bears to California would be years away and, for now, it only remains a possibility.
The bill to develop a roadmap for reintroduction, if passed, would mark a new chapter in how California lives alongside a species that has been gone from the memories of its residents.
But for the Yurok Tribe, the discussion is more than just wildlife management. It's another opportunity to reestablish a relationship that had existed for generations just as they have done with the California Condor.
Williams-Claussen, who was born in the 1980s, said condors were gone for most of her life. To her, the most exciting part of being part of the conservation process has been the condors becoming a part of daily household conversations. Condors are showing up in art and there's a new generation of school kids who get the chance to grow up with them.
“Should the grizzly return, I would be hopeful that that sort of thing would happen again. They would become a part of the conversation. They would become just a part of our lives again,” Williams-Claussen said.