For Steve Searles, teaching the mountain community of Mammoth Lakes to co-exist with the American black bear was all about fear. More precisely, about getting rid of fear.

“I just hate fear,” began Searles, 64, during a recent interview about “What the Bears Know,” his upcoming book. “We are unnaturally afraid of (black) bears. In Mammoth, I think we’ve overcome that. We are an example of how people can live with bears and overcome fears.”

The man who grew up in Orange County repairing bikes for resale and surfing in the waves of Newport Beach, got a job in this ski town 300 miles north of Los Angeles in the late 1990s that turned him into the Bear Whisperer — a moniker given him by a reality TV show airing on Animal Planet.

His bear management campaign kick-started a movement of coexistence that turned him into a folk hero in the touristy hamlet in the Eastern Sierra known for hiking and fishing in summer, and skiing in winter — and lots of resident black bears.

“Now, the school bus doesn’t care when they see a bear. People just ignore them and the bears ignore the people. We think it enhances our lives and it makes for a better day,” Searles said.

His lifelong work in Mammoth Lakes and later in Yosemite National Park has legs into Southern California, where folks have embraced urban mountain lions and are learning to live with black bears that amble down from the San Gabriel Mountains into hot tubs and backyards of homes in foothill communities.

Much like the neighbors in Hollywood and Los Feliz who learned to love P-22, the mountain lion who lived in Griffith Park for 10 years until he was euthanized in December, coexisting with bears came down to losing one’s fear of something unknown.

“If we don’t understand things, we fear them. That is a big part of the bear issue. They don’t want to eat us. We are the last thing they want to eat,” said Chris Erskine, 66, the book’s co-author, a resident of La Cañada Flintridge and a former Los Angeles Times columnist.

Method to his madness

While Searles’ methods at first seemed quixotic, they were based on an enduring platform: Don’t feed the bears.

When hired to kill 16 bears and cull the population, Searles quickly rejected the idea and found another way. In one day he gave out 85,000 stickers that read: “Mammoth: Don’t Feed Our Bears.” Soon they were slapped onto cash registers, windows, front doors and everywhere in town.

His education campaign, which spread throughout the nation, clamped down on poor trash management at local campgrounds and restaurants, added ways to lock trash bins and convinced residents to keep trash away from the outdoors.

“The whole community got behind it. It was people becoming more responsible,” Searles explained. “Tom Sawyer got everybody to paint the fence,” he said referencing the Mark Twain character. “I got everyone to buy in.”

Feeding the bears makes them accustomed to getting food from people. That is a death sentence for the bear, because eventually they will be caught eating from a trash bin or picking salmon off an outdoor barbecue grill. When neighbors call police, state authorities often intervene and kill the bear, Searles said.

People who report bears think they can be relocated deeper in the forest but that’s a myth, he said.

At Lake Mary near Mammoth, a bear habitually chows down on fish on a string caught by somebody fishing. “That bear just sits on his (behind) and eats all the fish and now they are talking about shooting that bear,” he said.

Searles doesn’t care for the name “Bear Whisperer” because he says he yells at the bears in full voice, and not softly, getting them to skedaddle from a porch or a home’s crawl space. He’s taught residents to yell “Bad bear! Very bad bear!” to get the bear to vamoose. He has used rubber bullets and even pepper spray when necessary.

He’s euthanized bears that were injured and severely sick. Each time he felt a pain in his heart, as his relationship with bears grew more personal over the years and led to a sort of friendship.

Visiting bear dens

Searles would creep into a bear’s den to observe hibernation patterns. Something perhaps ordinary folks should not try at home.

“I’d poke my head in and the bear was looking straight at me. Sometimes he’d get up and fluff up their bed. In the wild they used pine needles and leaves. They’d pull that against their tummies and build it up like a condor’s nest,” he described.

“Sometimes they’d clack their teeth together and make guttural noises. But in all these years I’ve done this, I’ve never been slapped,” Searles said.

The up-close-and-personal approach — explained in great detail in the book — bonded the Bear Whisperer with the black bear. But the high school dropout who has an uncanny affinity for animals wasn’t doing academic research. So why investigate bear dens? “I wanted to learn about them firsthand,” he said.

When bears were sleeping up in a tree, Searles could be found napping under the tree until the bear awakened and climbed down. It was part of his training, or he just likes bears, either way.

While the book is called “What the Bears Know,” it could have been called “What Searles Knows” after managing the town’s bear population for three decades and creating a bear management movement.

“I learned a lot about myself,” he said. “The fears that I had weren’t founded.”

Echoing Searles is Lynn Rogers, a research biologist with the North American Bear Center whose studies of bears in Michigan and Minnesota laid the groundwork for understanding the American black bear, Ursus americanus. 

The center’s website speaks of Rogers’ initial fear of black bears mostly from reading hunting magazines and seeing snarling bear mock-ups in museums. “But (Rogers) had learned enough from his 191 captures of black bears in Michigan to know that black bears were not the ferocious animals most people thought and that their behavior was characterized much more by restraint than ferocity,” the website explained.

Grizzlies vs. black bears

Erskine points out in the book that most Americans get their fear of bears from the grizzly bear, Ursus arctos horribilis. Grizzlies, mostly in Montana and Wyoming, are alpha predators and meat eaters. They have been known to attack humans.

But American black bears are mostly herbivores, and 96% of their diet is grasses, tubers, roots, and yes, flowers from people’s gardens and yards, Searles said. It’s only when people feed them Big Macs or pizza that they come back for more, he added.

In the book, Searles calls black bears “the tie-dyed hippies of the bear kingdom.” The do not roam in packs but forage one by one. And they are afraid of people.

The standard advice if a hiker sees a black bear is to make noise, act large, and don’t run away. If a bear is cornered in a structure, make sure the bear has a way out, he said. “If they are in your garage or in their kitchen, just start opening doors and let them out,” Searles said.

Nature is talking

Searles often waxes philosophically.

He says the act of taking a selfie with a bear so you can show your friends is a missed opportunity to see a bear naturally. It also acclimates a bear to people. Bears can smell candy or chewing gum in someone’s purse or pockets miles away.

As black bears expand their territory due to wildfires that are pushing them further out, there may be more bear-human encounters. Instead of imposing our will on the bears, he advocates watching and understanding — because nature is teaching us humans something every day.

“I’ve been around bears more than people on planet Earth and I’m still drawn to their magic, their calmness. They are incredibly powerful and strong and yet they choose not to hurt people. They just adapt, live and let live. They are wonderful, visible examples of what we should strive to be,” he said.

“What the Bears Know,” by Chris Erskine and Steve Searles, is published by Pegasus Books and will be released on Oct. 3. The authors will be reading from the book at 7 p.m., Oct. 3, at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101 and Oct. 4 at The Grove in Los Angeles.

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