Wildlife officers in British Columbia say they now know which animals killed a mother and her daughter on a forest trail at the end of October, and none of them is still alive. Genetic testing matched a sow and the three cubs she had raised for about a year to the attack near Bella Coola, and all four bears have been put down.
On 31 October, art therapist Jenny Balcarras, 48, went walking on the Snooka West Trail with Selah Reed, 20, her daughter, who worked as an education assistant. The alarm was raised when Selah failed to make her regular Saturday call to her sister. Searchers found Balcarras’s remains on 2 November and her daughter’s a day later, about 150 metres away.
More than a dozen conservation officers spent days tracking the family of bears through rough country in bad weather before trapping them at the weekend. Inspector Jeff Tyre told a briefing that the evidence pointed to predatory behaviour, something he described as “very rare”. He was candid about the gaps: investigators do not know how the encounter started, only how it finished. Bears that have killed people cannot be relocated or rehabilitated, he said, which is why the cubs were destroyed along with their mother.
The deaths hit a small, remote coastal community about 1,000 km north of Vancouver that was still raw from an earlier mauling. Last November a grizzly charged a group of pupils and teachers from a school run by the Nuxalk Nation, injuring four. DNA shows that animal, which was never caught, was not among the four killed now.
For many residents the new attack reopened old wounds, according to Samuel Schooner, who leads the Nuxalk council. The nation is keeping up night patrols and escorts for children walking to school, has asked people to avoid the trail, and says its cultural leaders will decide what happens to the bears’ remains. A family fundraiser has collected around 80,000 Canadian dollars.
