After a bear mauled a toddler in Maple Ridge on Sunday, parents in other parts of Metro Vancouver are sharing their own stories about close encounters with bears in their residential neighbourhoods. The three-year-old victim in the Maple Ridge attack was airlifted to BC Children’s Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. The B.C. Conservation Officer Service continues to investigate the incident, which included the girl’s father shooting the aggressive bear in the head with an arrow before the wounded animal ran off. “The bears definitely tend to get more aggressive and come into our areas the further into the season it gets,” Burnaby resident Nicole Gladish told CTV News in an interview near a playground in her townhouse complex. She said persistent hungry bears continue to linger in the area despite the complex’s strata investing in secure garbage enclosures. “At least twice a week, usually in the summer months, we have a couple of resident bears here,” Gladish said. “A larger female and a male. And they tend to have cubs, it seems, every season.” According to stats posted on the Ministry of Environment website, conservation officers dispatched 41 black bears in June of this year—up from 30 in 2025. During the same month this year, they relocated just two. “We know that bears have an amazing ability to come back,” said Holly Reisner of the North Shore Black Bear Society. “They have a geographic memory which is incredible. Bears can return from over 300 kilometres away.” Gladish, a research fellow in epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, has studied the issue in her free time. She said she has learned there is a much higher success rate for relocating younger bears than older ones, and she wishes conservation officers would choose that option more often. “If you actually get more nuanced policy involved of young bears, under the age of three-years-old, they will be able to be relocated with a 90 per cent success rate in as little as 30 kilometres relocation distance,” Gladish said. As a mom of three co-existing with bears near her home at the base of Burnaby Mountain, Gladish finds the attack in Maple Ridge terrifying. “That a black bear would scale at a fence to get at a young child...that is now my biggest fear,” she said. According to the B.C. Conservation Officer Service, the best way to avoid bear encounters in residential neighbourhoods is for people living there to remove or secure attractants, including garbage and fruit from trees in their yards.
