😳Back Yard Bear: OMG, he's HUGE!😳

We did not welcome this visitor to our back yard! Since then we've taken down all our bird feeders. From teeming with squawking birds and screeching squirrels, we now have NOTHING out there. Deadly silence. But we can't risk having bears habituated to our "feeding station". A fed bear is a dead bear, and though this guy's a nuisance, he is magnificent and we don't want anything to happen to him. We're on the very edge of a large green space with a creek running through it, and the creek is now full of spawning salmon  which will soon die and become appealingly stinky to the bears. We don't wish to provide them with suet and seeds for dessert.

💥Back Yard Bear: Our Fence has been CRASHED!💥

Such excitement in the back yard yesterday, and it was all CAUGHT ON TAPE! This young bear wandered into the back yard, knocked down a bird feeder, then flopped down and munched contentedly on sunflower seeds for 20 minutes or so, while we panicked and called the conservation people. We saw no break in the fence, so we didn't know how he got in or how he'd get out. But finally, after opening the gate (the sound spooked him) and banging on a pot, he leaped up the tall fence as nimbly as a cat, and wandered back and forth on the top of it before wandering away. Now we know bears can get in with no trouble at all, and I won't be able to refill the bird feeder for a while. Or not ever!

"Hello, how am I?"

Bear on the Rampage: outtakes

The gigantic black bear that terrorized the small town of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, holding its citizens hostage for a tense two hours.

The bear's preferred method of attack was to lie down on his victims.

The bear could sprint at a fantastic rate, reaching speeds of  up to 1/4  mile per hour.

BEAR!!!!!

Exhausted from a long day of terrorizing Port Coquitlam, the enormous bear lies down for a refreshing 15-hour nap.

Unbearable!

U.S. woman cleared in husband's hunting death peels out of court, music blaring - 570News

This is the kind of story that will likely appear on Dateline sometime next year, with Keith Morrison (he of the earnest, wrinkled, sardonic face, silver hair and ageless blue jeans) grilling Mary Beth Harshbarger about shooting and killing a "black mass" in the wild woods of Newfoundland.

The black mass in question turned out to be a husband. Her husband. The big issue here is whether or not she knew the difference.

The "weapon"was a hunting rifle given to her by her late husband Mark. Certain family members smelled fish, claiming Mary Beth was a crack shot, not likely to confuse Mark with a black bear.

Unless she had grown tired of this. . .black bear. . . and wanted him out of the way.

Why would anyone suspect such a thing? Rumour has it that she was getting mighty cozy with Mark's brother Barry. ("Bear" for short. Just kidding.) The family is now as bitterly divided over this issue as the Hatfields and the McCoys.

The judge must have decided that Mark looked more like a "big black thing" than anyone realized. Cleared of all wrongdoing, Mary Beth whooped and hollered, tooling out of the courtroom parking lot in her lawyer's Mercedes like something out of the Dukes of Hazzard.

Mark was Caucasian and didn't really resemble anything big and black. But he forgot to wear that orange thingie hunters should-a-ought-a wear in the woods. So it was really all his fault.

The most bizarre element of this whole story was the testimony of family friend Ann White, whose husband had also been mistakenly shot in 1958 (for a porcupine or a gorilla or something). She claimed Mark Harshbarger had recently jacked up his insurance coverage and told Barry to look after his family if anything ever happened to him.

"That's just how responsible he was."

So tell me. Is Mary Beth Harshbarger equally responsible?