WALPOLE ISLAND, Ontario – Police are investigating the death of a Northeast Ohio man, who they suspect was killed by lightning.

The 41-year-old Ravenna resident was out on his boat with friends and family on the south end Bassett Channel Friday afternoon.

Walpole Island Police say when the storm moved in, people on the boat tried to seek shelter in some reeds.

According to witnesses on the boat, they heard a loud crack and saw a bright flash.

Immediately after lightning struck, they found the victim lying on the deck unresponsive.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m. Friday, a 911 call was made and the Coast Guard was able to locate the boat and get it to shore.

An autopsy is scheduled for later today. The name of the victim is not being released until family is notified.

via Northeast Ohio Man Killed by Lightning in Canada – WJW.

A newborn baby is dead after being attacked by a dog, Quebec provincial police say.

The attack happened in Saint-Barnabé-Sud, Que., on Monday afternoon.

Police said they received a call about the three-week-old girl around 3:30 p.m. ET.

Neighbours said the baby was in the home on Rang Bas-Saint-Amable with a pair of huskies — a male and a female.

The dogs did not belong to the family, but to a couple visiting the home, they said.

For an unknown reason, one of the dogs, believed to be the male, attacked the baby, said police.

A baby died in a dog attack in Saint-Barnabé-Sud, 60 kilometres east of Montreal. (CBC)”The investigation is just starting. What happened exactly, we will learn more over the coming hours,” said provincial police Sgt. Claude Denis.

The incident has shocked members of the small community and many people gathered outside the home where it happened, Radio-Canada's Jean-Philippe Cipriani reported from the scene.

Both of the dogs were taken away by humane society officials, who said tests would be done to confirm which of the animals was responsible for the attack and whether it was suffering from any problems, such as rabies.

“They are not aggressive dogs,” said Claude Dionne of the St-Hyacinthe SPCA. “They are just territorial dogs.”

Dionne said it was likely the dog responsible for the attack would be euthanized.

Since 1990, there have been 28 fatalities related to dog attacks in Canada, according to Statistics Canada. Of those killed, 85 per cent were children under 12 years of age.

Saint-Barnabé-Sud is about 60 kilometres east of Montreal.

via CBC News – Montreal – Dog kills Quebec newborn.

NELSON – A recent bear attack on a four-year-old girl and her grandmother in their yard has prompted a call for diligence.

Conservation officer Len Butler killed the mature male black bear after it clawed Nine Mile resident Jane Tillotson and visiting granddaughter Megan Chapple.

The young girl required six to eight stitches on her leg following the Aug. 24 attack.

“I was babysitting my granddaughters, who are four and six, and we went out to work in my vegetable garden,” Tillotson said.

“We'd been there for maybe 15 or 20 minutes making lots of noise. My littlest granddaughter just yelled for me and I turned and looked at her and a big bear was right behind her.

“The bear swiped at her and cut the back of her calf so she fell. It looked like that bear was going to bite her.”

Tillotson said she scooped up Megan and slowly backed away from the bear with her other granddaughter right behind her.

The bear swiped at the child again, scratching Megan's belly and — though she didn't feel it at the time — Tillotson's thigh.

“I was just shrieking hysterically at the top of my lungs,” said Tillotson. “It was probably no more than a few seconds but it seemed like forever to me [before] it stopped and ambled out of the garden.”

Butler said he doesn't think the attack was predatory in nature.

“Basically the bear was there to get something to eat and these people were in the way,” he said. ” If the bear wanted to kill the little girl, [it] could have.”

When he arrived at the home, Butler said he found a “fairly large” black bear in the neighbour's compost. He had his dog chase the bear into a tree where it was shot.

Garth Mowat, the B.C. Environment Ministry's senior wildlife biologist for the Kootenay region, said it's rare for a black bear to attack and knew of only one other human-related attack by a bear in the past 18 months. “I've not heard of black bears attacking people over food very often,” he said. “There might have been something else going on.”

Mowat suggested the bear may have been afraid or it took the child for a dog that was bothering it.

A few days after the attack, Nelson police shot a black bear hunkered down in a residential area along a road frequented by school children.

Part of the problem, say wildlife experts, is people leaving garbage and compost accessible to bears.

Butler said conservation officers will be issuing more wildlife protection orders to clear garbage, compost and fallen fruit. People who don't comply could be fined $345.

via Public warned after bear attacks girl, woman.

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Sounds just terrible. Surprising to see a black bear involved in such a ferocious attack.

Gerald Marois heard the bear before he saw it.

“I turned around and he was about 50 feet away — one of the biggest bears I had ever seen in my life.

“He looked at me and moved sideways a bit, I start backing up and he just charged me. He came full blast, man.”

Marois, 47, a retired steelworker and experienced hunter from Waubaushene, was mauled by a large black bear last Tuesday evening in a remote wooded area about 30 km northwest of Orillia.

He was airlifted to Sunnybrook hospital, where he gave the Star an exclusive and terrifying account of his near-death encounter.

Marois was planting a food plot in a small clearing about 150 feet inside the bush line, where he planned to hunt deer in the fall — “My Dad taught me that’s where you get the big buck” — when the bear came up from behind him.

“His head was huge, his eyes were really far apart from each other and he had tiny, tiny ears, which is the sign of a huge boar — probably 600 pounds.”

When the bear charged, Marois said he turned around and ran toward a nearby oak tree — “The one I wanted to put my tree-stand in” — and climbed three-quarters of the way up.

The bear followed him up.

Marois shakes as he tells the story from his hospital bed, his arms, legs and face covered in deep gashes.

Marois said he tried to fight the bear off from the trees upper branches, but it kept coming up after him.

“I was hitting him on the nose and on the head, trying to hurt him, and every time I hit him he was scraping me and just pulling on my boots.”

The bear pulled one of his boots off and started biting the bottom of his feet.

“Then he dragged me almost to the ground.”

Marois tried and tried to get away from the bear by climbing farther up the tree, but the bear repeatedly dragged him down.

“I was kicking him with the other boot and he grabbed that boot and he ripped it right off.”

The bear then tried to rip off Marois’s chest waders.

“That was messing him up, because they were coming back like an elastic, eh? And it was hard for him to rip them off.”

But the bear eventually got them.

“Then he started eating my flesh.”

Marois said he watched as the bear started eating into his right calf.

“He was eating my meat and he was licking the blood and licking himself and just enjoying every bite of it.

Marois suffered his worst injuries to his legs, which required a skin graft to repair. They look torn apart and scrawny when he lifts up his hospital gown.

“He ate my whole calf.”

Marois says he made at least 10 attempts to climb away from the bear and it kept coming after him.

“I was trying to get away from him in every direction that I could in that oak tree, but he kept on dragging me down; he wanted me down on the ground.”

Marois, who said he forgot his bear spray at home, then turned to the only weapon he had.

“I got my lighter out” — a regular cigarette lighter — “and I started burning his face.”

Marois said when he shoved the lighter in the bear’s face it clawed him in the head.

“And that was it with the lighter, eh? No more lighters.”

Proof of the bear’s swipe comes in the two long rows of stitches on the top and side of Marois’s head.

“I got really weak from that hit. I had barely nothing left, so I told God I was putting my life in his hands.”

He said he prayed to God to send his guardian angel to protect him, because he couldn’t fight the bear off any longer.

At that moment, the bear threw Marois from the tree — Marois figures about 20 feet — and he landed with a thud and a loud groan.

When he looked up he watched the bear dive out of the tree in the opposite direction.

“It seemed like God scare him, man. People don’t believe in God, but I’m telling you, man, something scare him. Because he got scared, he jumped in the rough and he took off.”

Marois said the attack definitely lasted more than 15 minutes, though he says it “felt like forever.”

But he knew he still wasn’t safe.

He heard the bear roaming around him, gnashing his teeth and making a guttural barking noise Marois called a “bawl” — the same noise it made before charging at him.

“I was sure I was dead. I told God, ‘Keep your hand over me, protect me.’”

Marois called his wife and then 911, but the rescue team and emergency crews couldn’t find him in the thick bush.

It took rescuers — with the help of Marois’ wife, Louise Beauchamp — more than an hour to find him. All the while Marois could hear the bear nearby.

Eventually the rescuers found him, and with Marois’s legs ripped to shreds, they moved him to a clearing where the air ambulance helicopter could land.

“That’s when I finally could breathe.”

The next thing Marois remembers is waking up in the hospital.

Marois’ health has been improving every day, but doctors tell him he may need plastic surgery to fix his legs. He says he has nightmares about the attack every time he sleeps.“It’s extremely hard for me to rest.”

Though he sometimes struggles to tell the story, Marois speaks angrily about the cancellation of the spring bear hunt in Ontario more than 10 years ago.

“I want (Premier Dalton McGuinty) to reconsider the spring bear hunt, so this doesn’t happen no more.”

Mike Harris’s provincial government ended the spring bear hunt in 1999 after it had been in place for 30 years. Critics called the spring hunt “barbaric” because it often left behind thousands of orphaned cubs. All other Canadian provinces with bears have spring hunts except Nova Scotia. Ontario still has a fall bear hunt, which starts in September.

A spokesman for Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources said Friday that they thought the bear may have mistaken Marois — bent over and wearing chest waders — as a deer.

But Marois believes the bear was tracking him.

“He didn’t mistake me for nothing. That bear wanted to maul me; he was hungry and he came to get me.”

The ministry says bear encounters are not on the rise in the province, but Marois says he and his neighbours have seen different.

“We live up north, the bear are coming in our town, in our kids’ schoolyard. They walk the streets with their babies.

“I want the population of Toronto to be aware that they’re not scared of us. They roam the forest and if they’re hungry, they’ll get you, man. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Marois said his rescuers — a combination of OPP officers, paramedics and Port Severn firefighters — risked their lives entering the bush the way they did, not knowing if the bear was still in the area.

“I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart.”

Marois, who has been living in the Waubaushene area for more than 20 years, comes from a hunting family in rural Quebec.

“I was born with a rabbit snare and a pellet gun in my hands.”

But now he says he may never hunt again.

“It will be really hard to go back in the bush after this.”

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The Golden Retriever was covered in blood after saving it’s 11-year-old owner from a cougar attack in Boston Bar, B.C.

A faithful White Retriever saved an 11-year-old boy from a vicious cougar attack in Boston Bar, B.C. Friday.

RCMP say that the boy, named Austin, and dog were in their family’s backyard when a cougar started advancing on the child.

Sgt. Peter Thiessen said the boy was spared from the encounter when the White Retriever jumped in the way and took the brunt of the attack.

The two animals began attacking each other, giving the boy time to run home and call 9-1-1.

A Boston Bar RCMP officer was near the area and arrived minutes later to find the dog in a brutal fight for survival against the larger predator under the home’s porch.

As the cougar bit down on the retriever’s neck, the RCMP officer advanced on the wild animal and fired two shots into the cat’s rear end.

The cougar continued its attack, so the officer walked up to the cat and fired again, this time killing the animal.

Police say the dog survived with minor injuries and the boy was completely unharmed.

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A Miracle Beach man is taking a bear mauling in stride this week after a black bear swiped the top of his head and sent him flying 10 feet.

Today, Ed Claydon says the whole experience should serve as a public reminder that bears are feeding and should be treated with respect.

Claydon was going out to the car shortly around 7:45 Thursday evening with a flashlight when he heard a growling sound.

He took another step and heard another growl.

He stopped under an apple tree and, thinking it was a raccoon or something, he looked down at the ground.

Little did he know a black bear was sitting in the tree directly above him. It took a swipe, and sent him flying.

When he landed, Claydon shone the flashlight at the apple tree and met his adversary.

He quickly skirted away from the bear, back toward the house and let himself in the back door.

“When I saw him I couldn’t even comprehend what had happened,” said his wife, Joy. “His face was dripping in blood. I thought maybe he’d caught his face on a tree branch but he said no, a bear just attacked me.” She took him to the hospital, where the deep gash on the top of his head was stitched up and released.

Aside from the stitches he also sustained injuries to his shoulder – which took the brunt of his fall.

But his pain could have been a lot worse.

If he hadn’t looked down the gash could have been across the side of his face.

The Claydons live about 500 yards from Black Creek, where bears hang out and gorge themselves on salmon.

Though they pick and use most of their apples, they leave the very high ones – too high to reach with a ladder – for the wind and eventually, the deer to enjoy.

“I guess when we were attracting the deer we were also attracting the bears,” Joy Claydon said. “I guess he moral of the story is don’t leave any fruit on the ground.” Even after the attack Ed Claydon, says he doesn’t feel the bear meant him any particular harm.

He didn’t even ask the conservation officers to attend.

Conservation officer Ben York advises people to let his office investigate and decide whether a bear is dangerous or not.

He says in most cases, if a bear was acting defensively, people will be educated about bear attractants and the bear will be left alone.

If a bear is acting aggressively or in a predatory manner it will be investigated, tracked down and removed.

But the Claydons said the bear definitely fell into the first category.

“The bear meant him no malice,” said Joy Claydon. “It was just a swat to say get away from my tree. It was not a rogue bear.” The last bear complaint conservation officers had from the Miracle Beach area was in August.

“It’s been extraordinarily quiet,” said York. “It’s been one of the quietest years across B.C. we’ve had in years.

“We haven’t even set a trap yet and usually at this time of year we have all of our traps going.” He suspects good berry crop, abundant pink salmon stocks in the rivers, and more bear awareness mean bears don’t need to depend on human garbage as much as they have in the past.

“It might even be because people are starting to learn,” said York.

Though bears usually hibernate by late November or mid December, bear sightings can occur on the coast year round.

© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist

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Young folk singer dead after attack by coyotes in Nova Scotia park

HALIFAX, N.S. — A young Canadian folk singer who had just set off on a solo tour to boost a promising musical career died Wednesday after being mauled by two coyotes in what is believed to be one of the country’s first fatal attacks by the animals.

Taylor Mitchell was hiking alone in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park on Tuesday afternoon when a pair of coyotes attacked her, leaving her critically injured with bite wounds covering most of her body.

The 19-year-old singer’s screams for help were heard by at least two other hikers, who rushed to the Skyline Trail and called 911 at around 3 p.m. as the animals continued their brutal attack on the young Toronto woman.

Mitchell, who was on a three-week tour of the region to promote her debut CD, was to play in Sydney, N.S., on Wednesday night when she decided to go for a hike in the scenic park.

“She loved going into the woods and hiking,” Lisa Weitz, her manager in Toronto, said through tears. “She was absolutely pumped about her first tour on the East Coast and to take her songwriting craft to new audiences…

“She just had a wonderful joy of life and sharing music.”

Mitchell, who had about a dozen concert dates in the Maritimes, was rushed to a local hospital and then airlifted to Halifax. She died at about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, police said.

Paul Maynard of Emergency Health Services said she was already in critical condition when paramedics arrived on the scene and was bleeding heavily from multiple bite wounds.

“She was losing a considerable amount of blood from the wounds,” he said.

“This was really out of the ordinary – the first I’ve heard of something like this.”

RCMP Sgt. Brigdit Leger said officers shot one of the two animals, apparently wounding it, but both managed to get away.

An official with Parks Canada said they barricaded the entrance to the trail where Mitchell was attacked and were trying to find the animals to determine what prompted such an unusual attack.

Helene Robichaud, the park’s superintendent, said there have been a handful of reports of aggressive coyotes over the last 15 years, but they have not seen any attacks on people.

“There’s been some reports of aggressive animals, so it’s not unknown,” she said. “But we certainly never have had anything so dramatic and tragic.”

Officials shot a coyote late Tuesday, but Robichaud doubted that it was one of the two involved in the attack.

The provincial Natural Resources Department said there is no other record of a fatal coyote attack on a human in Nova Scotia since the animals were first discovered in the province in the ’70s.

In 2003, a teenage girl was bitten on the arm by a coyote while walking on the same trail as Mitchell, said Germaine LeMoine of Parks Canada. The girl’s parents managed to scare the animal away.

Biologists said it’s unlikely the coyotes involved had contracted rabies or were protecting young animals.

Bob Bancroft, a Nova Scotia wildlife biologist, said coyotes shy away from humans. But not all animals – particularly young, inexperienced coyotes in parks – view humans as predators.

“This is probably just a couple of coyotes that saw something vulnerable and went for it,” he said. “It’s horrible. It’s not something you would expect at all.”

Coyotes in the region are larger and behave somewhat differently than their counterparts in Western Canada, he said. Large males in Nova Scotia can weigh up to 60 pounds.

Simon Gadbois, a professor at Dalhousie University who studies animal behaviour, said hikers should always be vigilant and aware of their surroundings.

Should a hiker unintentionally surprise a coyote or other animal, Gadbois has simple, potentially life-saving advice: Never act like prey.”The worst thing you can do is start running away,” he said. “Wave your arms, shout, just show that you mean business basically and most animals will think twice.”

Ethel Merry, who manages a motel 10 kilometres from the park in Cheticamp, said people in the area have been seeing more coyotes in the last three years and are calling for controls on their numbers.

Merry said she and her family have seen packs of up to seven coyotes wandering around people’s yards and attacking pets.

“I’m not surprised at all that this happened,” she said. “The coyotes are all around us. … I am so afraid to walk my road.”

Mitchell, who graduated from the Etobicoke School of the Arts, had recently been nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award and was being roundly praised for her songwriting talent.

Mitchell’s MySpace site shows the singer standing in the woods with her guitar and a suitcase at her side, along with the cover photo of her album, “For Your Consideration.”

Weitz said the singer had just gotten her licence and a new car, which she loaded with her CDs before setting off alone on the tour.

“She was a beautiful, dynamic, young, talented woman and we’re all so saddened and shocked,” Weitz said.

“She was such a young and old soul at the same time. She just knew how to beautifully craft a song.”

Singer Suzie Vinnick met the performer about three years ago and acted as a mentor, teaching her guitar as Mitchell played bars in Ontario and started to garner attention.

“She was really keen and hungry in a really positive way,” she said in an interview. “She was a great lyricist and held a lot of promise. I mean, she was at it for two years and already managed to get a Canadian Folk Music nomination.”

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Nursing bite wounds inflicted by a grizzly bear, two B.C. hunters are thankful to have survived a harrowing attack inside their tent.

Jeff Hebert and Ken Scown, both of Nelson, B.C., were camping overnight Wednesday in the East Kootenays when the grizzly bear attacked about 10:20 p.m.

Scown, 36, was asleep but Hebert, 32, was reading and heard the bear charge their tent.

“There was no warning, there was no other sound other than the sound of something very heavy running towards the tent and huffing — just a deep, guttural huff and it was getting closer very fast,” said Hebert.

He woke Scown and grabbed his rifle beside him, which didn’t have a round in the chamber as a safety precaution.

“She came so fast I didn’t even have time to cycle the bolt — she hit us in the tent and collapsed the tent over top of us and started mauling my partner,” said Hebert.

“She was just trashing and tossing us both around.”

The grizzly mauled the men from outside the tent and they couldn’t see the animal, but the tracks in the snow later proved it was a bear.

“It was absolutely terrifying — pretty much every tenter’s worst nightmare to get attacked in your tent at night,” said Scown, a forester.

While the bear mauled Scown, Hebert used his right hand to prepare his rifle to fire and attempted to push the grizzly off his friend with his left hand.

“That’s when she turned and bit me in the arm,” he said, adding he then stuck the gun underneath the bear and pulled the trigger, but it didn’t fire because the round wasn’t properly in the chamber.

After attacking the pair for about a minute, the bear gave up and wandered away.

“Thank God, I guess we fought back hard enough that she decided we weren’t an easy meal and left,” said Hebert, nursing a pair of two-inch deep bite wounds to his left forearm.

Scown had been wearing more layers and amazingly suffered only three puncture wounds that aren’t as deep.

They hiked 5 km to their truck and drove 1 1/2 hours to Cranbrook Hospital for treatment.

The experienced outdoorsmen both intend to continue hunting.

Scown said he disagrees with the decision of local conservation officers, who ruled the bear wasn’t behaving in a predatory manner and shouldn’t be tracked and killed.

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This is really tragically bad luck.

MONTREAL – A man fought off a bear to save his wife on an isolated forest trail in La Tuque only to have a car accident rushing her to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

The man, in his 40s, is in a state of shock, police said.

The husband was clearing brush near a forest road about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday when his wife was attacked by a bear. The man managed to pull his wife from the bear’s clutches and was driving to the nearest hospital, a 90-minute drive, when he lost control of the car and headed into a ditch.

Nearby residents found the couple and contacted police.

The couple was rushed to the hospital, but the woman did not survive.

The exact cause of her death has yet to be determined.

Quebec wildlife officials are heading today to La Tuque, about 270 kilometres north of Montreal, to capture the bear, Sûreté du Québec Sgt. Claude Denis said.

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A family photo of Caleigh Cunning, 5, who survived an attack by a seal.

Photograph by: Handout, …

METRO VANCOUVER — Minutes after she escaped from a harbour seal that had pulled her into the water off West Vancouver’s Thunderbird Marina, Caleigh Cunning had a few questions for her father.

“She said, ‘Daddy, why did the seal drag me in the water?’” her father, North Vancouver resident Mike Cunning, said Wednesday.

“I said, ‘I think the seal wanted you to go for a swim.’

“She said, ‘Well, the seal wasn’t very nice.’”

At about 6 p.m. Tuesday, Cunning, Caleigh and some friends were standing at a dockside fish-cleaning table, washing the day’s catch.

Cunning turned from his daughter for a moment and heard a splash.

“I looked over and couldn’t see my daughter anywhere.”

Caleigh, who’d been wearing a life jacket, popped up about two metres away.

“I said, ‘Caleigh, swim to me, swim to me Caleigh!’”

Cunning said his friend, who had seen the incident, told him the seal had jumped four feet out of the water, took Caleigh by the arm and dragged her into the water.

The incident — from the moment the seal grabbed Caleigh to her recovery back on the dock — took about 10 to 15 seconds, he said.

“It just happened so quickly. It was instantaneous.”

Caleigh treaded water back to the dock. When Cunning pulled his crying, shocked daughter out of the water, he saw her hand was swollen and covered in blood.

Caleigh was treated at Lions Gate Hospital for five puncture wounds to her wrist and placed on antibiotics to ward off infection.

Conflicts between humans and harbour seals are rare, said Paul Cottrell, marine mammal coordinator for the federal department of fisheries and oceans’ Pacific region.

Seals are most likely to appear where they have easy access to food, and that includes marinas, he said.

He said Caleigh had been throwing fish guts and bits to seals earlier that evening, a common but discouraged practice, which may have left fish slime on her hands.

The slime’s scent most likely attracted the seal because it was accustomed to eating thrown fish scraps.

“This is a case of a harbour seal misinterpreting this girl’s hand, thinking that it was a piece of fish.”

Cottrell said the DFO encourages marinas to supply containers for fish remnants near cleaning tables.

Though the incident was a harrowing one, it could have been worse, Cunning said.

Caleigh is taking swimming lessons and she’s confident around the water, said Cunning, an avid fisherman.

“She loves fishing and reeling in fish. She’s been around the ocean all her life.”

Many years ago, a member of Cunning’s extended family drowned when she was five years old, so he is very sensitive and safety-conscious around water, he said.

“Her life jacket gets on in the parking lot, and it doesn’t come off until we get back to the car.”

Thunderbird Marina manager Fred McDonald said though seals are a common sight at the marina, this is the first incident he’s heard of involving an aggressive seal.

Cunning said he was concerned low fish stocks have resulted in an abundance of seals gathering around marinas, which could pose a threat to humans.

But Cottrell said the seal population “has flattened out and stabilized. It’s hit a natural balance.”

About 40,000 seals populate the Strait of Georgia, and about 110,000 seals live along the B.C. coast, Cottrell said.

He said interaction with seals could be pursued as a violation of the Fisheries Act. The regulations apply to people who initiate feeding, touching or swimming with a marine mammal.

Cottrell knew of one similar incident: a B.C. sport fisherman was bitten by a harbour seal as he tried to release a juvenile salmon into the water.