Across California, some 60,000 black bears are quietly rewriting the boundaries between wilderness and neighborhood, drawn not by aggression but by the oldest of imperatives: the search for food and shelter. Their growing presence in the suburbs and edges of Los Angeles and other cities marks a turning point in the long negotiation between human settlement and wild nature. The bears have not changed their nature — it is the landscape around them that has changed, and now the question falls to residents to decide what kind of neighbors they are willing to be.