The current name can be attested back to 1902:[4] John Burns, a Scotsman living in Santa Cruz, named Bonny Doon after a line in the Robert Burns song "The Banks O' Doon".

[5] At 2:54 p.m. on June 11, 2008, a fire broke out at the Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve, a preserve with a number of hiking trails located on Martin Road.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for Santa Cruz County.

The blaze cost over $5.4 million to contain and was part of a busy summer of wildfires in California.

[6] Little more than one year later, on August 12, 2009 at 7:16 pm, a second fire started in Bonny Doon, near the Lockheed facility off Empire Grade.

{Stories of the heroic actions of community members who stayed behind to protect homes yet to be added by a local resident} According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP covers an area of 16.7 square miles (43.2 km2), all of it land.

The road to Bonny Doon from State Route 1, named Bonny Doon Road, crosses an enclosed, unmarked conveyor belt, which carried limestone from a quarry 3 miles (4.8 km) east to the Cemex cement plant in Davenport.

The Davenport plant had supplied cement for later stages of the Panama Canal and other large projects since its founding in 1906, but is now closed.

[24] There were 1,218 housing units at an average density of 73.0 per square mile (28.2/km2), of which 73.3% were owner-occupied and 26.7% were occupied by renters.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988), a noted science fiction author, and his wife Virginia, resided in Bonny Doon from 1965 until just before his death.