Bear wanders into house, breaks computer monitor

An Alberta man captured photos of a bear inside his house. Sean Reddy said the bear encounter at his Fort McMurray-area home began when his dogs cornered the bear in the family’s garage.

The bear then climbed in through a window and Reddy saw the animal cross a hallway into his son’s bedroom.

The resident enlisted the help of a neighbour to use a bookshelf and other furniture to create a barricade before reopening the bedroom door to allow the bear to leave through the same window it used to enter the home.

Reddy said the damage to the house was minimal, but the bear smas­hed his son’s computer monitor and ate some cereal that had been left out. A trap has been set outside Reddy’s home, but the bear has yet to return to the scene of the break-in.

Rare leopard cub makes debut at California zoo

A rare Amur leopard cub has made her public debut at the Santa Barbara Zoo in California, the US.

The cub, named Marta, spent about an hour in her outdoor habitat. Marta was born in August and had remained off exhibit since then to bond with her mother.

Amur leopards are native to northeast Asia and are critically endangered, according to the World Wildlife Fund. They are also known as the Far East leopard, the Manchurian leopard or the Korean leopard.

Ultra-rare ‘cotton candy’ lobster

A Maine lobsterman made a one-in-100 million discovery when he found a lobster with an extremely rare ‘cotton candy’ colour scheme.

Get Maine Lobster, a Portland-based direct-to-consumer seafood company, said Bill Coppersmith, a lobsterman who supplies crustaceans to the company, found the rare cotton candy lobster during a day of fishing.

The lobster’s colouring only appears in an estimated 1 in 100 million lobsters. Coppersmith dubbed the lobster Haddie, after his granddaughter. Get Maine Lobster said Haddie will not end up on a dinner plate, but will be donated to an aquarium or other appropriate facility that will take care of the shellfish.

Five different fruit species on one tree!

An Australian gardener earned a Guinness World Record when he successfully grafted five different types of fruit onto a single tree.

Hussam Saraf of Shepparton, Victoria, said he actually grafted 10 different fruits onto the tree in his backyard, but Guinness World Records told him not all of them counted as different types.

Saraf’s tree bears white and yellow nectarines, white and yellow peaches, blood and yellow plums, peachcots, apricots, almonds and cherries.

“They told me my application was rejected, because they needed five different species, not varieties,” Saraf said.

Guinness initially told Saraf he had merely tied the record of five fruits, which was set by Luis H. Carrasco of Chile, but a further review found two of Carrasco’s fruits — peaches and nectarines — only counted as a single species, reducing his number to four and giving the new record to Saraf.

Published in Dawn, Young World, November 20th, 2021