Quagga on bridge

[timbrigham]

I put together a transparent SQUID server / bridge combo about a year back, but lately there have been some changes to our network topology. Instead of trying to keep adding static routes I decided to install quagga per this topic https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-673898-highlight-.html?sid=0aa2b23b629ca6568227fb8298ece17a.

For some reason I can no longer start by bridge.
When I run /etc/init.d/net.br0 start I receive the usual adding eth0 eth1, bringing up br0 messages. However, it errors out on the adding default gateway with RTNETLINK answers no such process.
I looked around and found this looks like a problem with the default route entry, so I pulled it from the net config file, but at that point I started to receive "network interface br0 does not exist, please verify hardware or kernel module (driver)".
I had recently updated the kernel, so I thought that maybe I missed rebuilding the bridge options. Cat .config | grep BRIDGE yields that I have all of the bridging options built into the kernel.

Any ideas as to what is causing this behavior?