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A bear has surprised utility workers in Canada by taking a snooze on an electricity pole.




A resident of Shellbrook, a rural community in the Saskatchewan province, alerted the local power company, and a crew was quickly despatched. "By the time our crew got on site, the bear was already on top of the pole," spokesman Tyler Hopson from the SaskPower utility tells Canadian Metro newspaper. "He was awake initially, and got fairly comfortable it seems and decided to have a bit of a nap."

The SaskPower crew was worried about whether it would be able to get the bear back down without harming it, or bringing down the power in the local area, it says in a message on Facebook. In the end, the bear came down of its own accord - but not before it took a short nap. "He did manage to get down from the pole safely and is not injured as far as we know," Hopson says, adding the bear "didn't do any damage to the pole or cause any sort of power outage".

Bears are known to roam the sparsely populated Saskatchewan province. While they're not usually spotted on electricity poles, The local government has published detailed instructions on how to avoid conflict with black bears.

Bear spotted lounging in hammock

Summer in the Northern Hemisphere doesn't officially start until June 21, but last week in Florida a forward-thinking black bear got a head start on the rest of us.

Vincent James of Daytona Beach told WESH-TV he saw the bear climb into the hammock on Thursday and proceed to lounge like "a tourist or something."

According to James, this bear stayed in the hammock for about 20 minutes, relaxing and allowing a photographer to shoot several soon-to-be widely shared photos of the unlikely visitor.

Fellow residents have recently reported several sightings of black bears roaming the neighborhood, sifting through trash cans.

Officials with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have been warning Floridians for months not to feed the bears.

In January, wildlife law enforcement officers arrested an 81-year-old woman in Sebring, Fla., after she repeatedly refused to stop feeding bears on her property.

According to police, the woman, Mary Musselman, was feeding the bears as many as 18 bowls of dog food at a time. One bear, captured on her property in November, had to be euthanized.

"A fed bear is a dead bear," Gary Morse, a spokesman for the commission, told WFLA-TV. "You cannot relocate a bear that's become a nuisance. No matter where you put them they're going to exhibit that behavior and the behavior will become worse over time to where it may be a threat to personal safety."