Black bears live in and around Redwood National and State Parks, and they are the only bear species you could encounter there. Grizzly bears were driven out of California over a century ago, so the American black bear has the redwood coast to itself. Sightings are not everyday events for most visitors, since these bears tend to avoid people, but their presence shapes how the park manages food storage, campground rules, and trail advisories throughout the year.
Black Bears, Not Grizzlies
California’s state flag features a grizzly bear, which creates a reasonable assumption that grizzlies still roam the state. They do not. The last confirmed California grizzly was killed in 1924, and the species has been absent from the state ever since. Every bear in Redwood National Park is a black bear, Ursus americanus. Despite the name, black bears in this region are not always black. Their fur ranges from jet black to cinnamon brown, and occasionally a lighter blond. Visitors sometimes mistake a brown-coated black bear for a grizzly, but the body shape tells the story: black bears have a straighter facial profile, taller ears relative to head size, and lack the pronounced shoulder hump that defines grizzlies.
Black bears across California number roughly 50,000 to 70,000, based on a statewide population model that combined hunting data and camera-trapping surveys. The model estimated an average population of about 60,000 individuals over a recent five-year period.1Ecological Solutions and Evidence. Estimating wildlife populations and their dynamics using multiple data sources and a hierarchical integrated model: The case of California’s black bears The densest concentrations are in the Sierra Nevada and the mountains of northwestern California, which puts Redwood National Park’s Del Norte and Humboldt County territory squarely within prime black bear habitat.
How Likely Are You to See One?
Most visitors to Redwood National Park never see a bear. Black bears in the coastal redwood belt are generally shy and crepuscular, meaning they are most active around dawn and dusk. The dense undergrowth of sword ferns, huckleberry, and redwood sorrel provides ample cover, and bears typically hear or smell a hiker long before the hiker notices them. That said, encounters tick upward in late summer and fall when bears are in hyperphagia, the period of intense feeding before winter dormancy. During hyperphagia, bears may spend 20 hours a day eating, which brings them into meadows, along streams where salmon run, and occasionally into campgrounds.
The park’s backcountry trails, particularly those in the Redwood Creek drainage and the more remote stretches along the coast, are more likely to put you in bear territory than a short walk through Stout Grove or the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. Even there, though, the evidence of bears is more common than the bears themselves. Overturned logs, claw marks on tree bark, and scat full of berry seeds are the usual giveaways.
What Bears Eat in the Redwoods
Black bears are omnivores with a diet that shifts dramatically by season. In spring, they graze on grasses, clover, and fresh shoots. By summer, berries become the main event, with huckleberries, salal berries, and blackberries drawing bears into dense thickets across the coastal hills. In fall, acorns and salmon are high-calorie staples that fuel the weight gain needed for winter. Bears in the Redwood region also eat insects, grubs, and the occasional small mammal, but plant material dominates their diet for most of the year.
This heavy reliance on fruit makes black bears effective, if accidental, gardeners. A study examining seeds from seven fleshy-fruited shrub species found that passage through a black bear’s digestive system altered germination rates in species-specific ways. Seeds of most species remained highly viable after digestion, and for some species, germination improved compared to uneaten seeds.2The American Midland Naturalist. Are American Black Bears (Ursus americanus) Legitimate Seed Dispersers for Fleshy-fruited Shrubs? Because bears range widely and deposit scat far from where they originally fed, they scatter viable seeds across large areas. In an ecosystem like the redwood coast, where understory shrubs play important roles in soil stability and food webs for birds and insects, this dispersal matters.
Bears and Redwood Trees Themselves
One of the more surprising interactions between black bears and coast redwoods involves bark stripping. Bears peel bark from redwood trunks to reach the sugar-rich cambium layer underneath, particularly in spring when sap is flowing. This behavior has been documented mainly in commercial timber stands rather than old-growth forests, and it has become a growing concern for the timber industry in the region. The stripping can girdle a tree, damaging its ability to transport water and nutrients, and at scale it represents a real threat to managed redwood stands. Researchers have even begun testing hyperspectral remote sensing to detect bear damage from the air, since visually surveying thousands of acres of dense forest on foot is impractical.3Forests. Can a Remote Sensing Approach with Hyperspectral Data Provide Early Detection and Mapping of Spatial Patterns of Black Bear Bark Stripping in Coast Redwoods?
In old-growth redwoods like those in the national park, bark stripping is less of a management crisis because the trees are not being harvested and their massive trunks can absorb damage that would kill a younger plantation tree. But the behavior itself is the same, and it illustrates something visitors often miss: bears are not just passing through the redwood forest. They are interacting with the trees directly, exploiting a food source that no other large mammal in the region targets.
Food Storage and Campground Rules
If you are camping in Redwood National and State Parks, you will encounter bear-related regulations. The parks require that all food, coolers, scented toiletries, and anything with an odor be stored in a hard-sided vehicle or a bear-proof container when not in active use. Some backcountry sites have bear boxes (metal food lockers); where they are not provided, bear canisters are the expectation. Hanging food from a tree branch, the old backpacker’s method, is no longer considered reliable because black bears in well-visited areas have learned to defeat most hang systems.
These rules exist not primarily for your safety but for the bears’. A bear that learns to associate humans with easy food becomes a problem bear. It returns to campsites, grows bolder, and eventually poses enough of a risk that wildlife managers may have to relocate or kill it. The adage “a fed bear is a dead bear” is not dramatic rhetoric; it is the actual management trajectory once habituation sets in. Proper food storage keeps bears wild and alive.
Cooking and eating should happen well away from your sleeping area in backcountry camps. Even in car-accessible campgrounds, leaving a cooler on a picnic table overnight is an invitation. Bears have an extraordinary sense of smell, often cited as several times more sensitive than a bloodhound’s, and they can detect food through car doors and tent walls.
What to Do During a Bear Encounter
If you see a black bear at a distance in the park, the standard advice is to enjoy the sighting and give the animal space. Do not approach for a photograph. If the bear has not noticed you, quietly back away. If it has noticed you and is watching, make yourself look large, speak in a calm firm voice, and slowly retreat. Running triggers a chase instinct in most large predators and should always be avoided.
If a black bear approaches you, the response differs from grizzly encounters. With black bears, standing your ground and making noise is almost always effective. Yelling, banging pots, or clapping your hands typically sends them off. Bears that bluff-charge usually stop short and then leave. In the extremely rare event that a black bear makes contact, fighting back is the recommended response, unlike with grizzlies, where playing dead can sometimes defuse an attack. Black bear attacks in the redwood coast region are extraordinarily uncommon; most bear encounters amount to a startled animal crashing away through the underbrush before you fully register what you saw.
Bear spray is legal to carry in California and in Redwood National Park, and some hikers bring it for peace of mind. Realistically, the chance of needing it on a trail in the redwoods is very low, but for backcountry campers spending multiple nights in bear territory, it is a reasonable precaution.
How Bears Reached the Redwood Coast
California’s black bear population has an interesting genetic backstory. A DNA analysis of over 500 bears from across the state identified distinct population clusters and evidence of two separate historical colonization events that shaped the genetic structure of today’s bears.4Journal of Mammalogy. Black Bear Population Genetics in California: Signatures of Population Structure, Competitive Release, and Historical Translocation Some of this structure reflects natural barriers like major valleys and high mountain passes, but part of it traces to deliberate human intervention. In the mid-twentieth century, California’s Department of Fish and Game translocated bears into areas where populations had been depleted, and those introductions left detectable genetic signatures that persist today.
The relevance for the Redwood region is that northwestern California bears are genetically connected to broader coastal and Klamath Range populations. They are not an isolated pocket. Bears move between the park, surrounding state and federal lands, and private timber holdings, which means that the park’s bear population is not really “the park’s” in any fixed sense. Individual bears may wander dozens of miles and cross jurisdictional boundaries routinely. This connectivity is generally a good thing for genetic health and population resilience, but it also means that bear management in the redwoods cannot happen in isolation from what is happening on neighboring lands.
Seasonal Patterns and When Bears Are Most Active
Black bears in the Redwood region do not truly hibernate in the way bears in colder climates do. Coastal winters are mild enough that some bears remain intermittently active throughout the cold months, particularly in years with ample food. Pregnant females den more reliably, typically entering a hollow log, a root cavity, or a self-dug hillside depression in late fall and giving birth to one to three cubs in January or February. Cubs emerge with their mother in spring and stay with her through the following year.
For visitors, this seasonal pattern has practical implications. Spring and early summer are the times you are most likely to encounter a mother with cubs, which is the scenario that demands the most caution. A sow with cubs is more defensive than a lone bear and more likely to bluff-charge if she perceives a threat. Giving a bear family extra distance, and never positioning yourself between a mother and her cubs, is the single most important safety rule in bear country.
Fall, during hyperphagia, is when bears are least selective about food sources and most likely to wander into campgrounds or parking areas. The parks sometimes increase bear-activity advisories during this period, and it is the season when bear-proof food storage matters most. By late November or December, bear activity drops off, though it does not vanish entirely on the mild coast.
Bears and the Bigger Redwood Ecosystem
Black bears sit at an interesting spot in the food web of the redwood coast. They are the largest land predator in the park, with adult males typically weighing between 200 and 400 pounds, but they are not apex predators in the way wolves or grizzlies are. Mountain lions also inhabit the park and occupy a more purely predatory niche. Bears and mountain lions overlap in territory but rarely interact directly; mountain lions hunt deer, while bears spend most of their energy on plants and insects.
Where bears exert the most ecological influence is through their sheer volume of feeding. A single bear eating berries for 20 hours a day during hyperphagia processes enormous quantities of fruit. The seed dispersal that results, as the research on fleshy-fruited shrubs demonstrated, connects plant populations across distances that wind or bird dispersal alone might not bridge.2The American Midland Naturalist. Are American Black Bears (Ursus americanus) Legitimate Seed Dispersers for Fleshy-fruited Shrubs? Bears also turn over soil and decaying logs while foraging for grubs, aerating forest floor material and accelerating decomposition. In salmon-bearing streams, bears that haul fish carcasses into the forest deliver marine-derived nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, to terrestrial soils. This nutrient transfer has been well documented in Pacific Northwest forests and likely occurs in the Redwood Creek and other park waterways where salmon still run.
The redwood forest is often described in terms of its trees, the tallest living organisms on Earth, but the ecosystem beneath those canopies depends on a web of animal interactions. Bears are one of the larger threads in that web, connecting berry patches to distant clearings, streams to hillsides, and one season’s food surplus to the next year’s plant growth.
Common Misconceptions About Redwood Park Bears
A few misunderstandings come up regularly among visitors planning trips to the park. One is that bears in the redwoods are especially large or aggressive because they live in an old-growth forest. In reality, coastal black bears are average-sized for the species, and old-growth forest is not richer bear habitat than second-growth forest with its denser understory of fruiting shrubs. Bears often do better in younger, more disturbed forests where sunlight reaches the ground and berry bushes thrive.
Another misconception is that the park’s coastal fog belt somehow keeps bears away from the immediate shoreline. Bears do use the coastal zone, particularly where streams meet the ocean. They are not strictly inland animals in this region. Visitors camping at Gold Bluffs Beach, for instance, are in bear country just as much as those at Jedediah Smith campground deep in the forest.
Finally, some visitors assume that because redwoods are conifers with no nuts or fruit, bears have little reason to be in the forest itself. The trees are indeed poor direct food sources outside of the cambium bears access through bark stripping. But the redwood understory is a different story entirely. Huckleberry, salal, salmonberry, and thimbleberry all grow profusely under the redwood canopy, and these are among the most important foods in the coastal black bear’s diet. The forest floor, not the canopy, is what makes redwood groves attractive to bears.