ENCOUNTERS OF THE URSINE KIND - Cottagers almost blasé as black bears become ever more resourceful in their quest for food

Trish Crawford, Living Reporter

When it comes to bear tales, it's hard to top Mike Chonko.

A bear ate his truck.

After breaking into the truck's cab in the summer of 2004, a bear cub fought, clawed, chewed and busted his way out the back window, leaving more than $10,000 worth of damage in his wake.

The sharp-edged water soldier plant, a risk to swimmers, now is fouling the Trent system

(ON) The Toronto Star, Emily Mathieu STAFF REPORTER

An aquatic invader is camping out on the banks of the Trent-Severn Waterway, and from the sounds of it, is getting very comfortable.

"We have been doing surveillance of this plant; it is the first known sighting in Canada," said Francine MacDonald, an aquatics biologist at the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters who is an expert in invasive species.

Leslie Scrivener Staff Reporter Dark and swift, flocks of cormorants soar above Lake Ontario before hundreds of them finally dip down to the diamond-flecked water. It's a stirring sight on a bright spring day.

But cormorants are less beautiful on land.

One arm of the Leslie Street Spit, home to Tommy Thompson Park and the Great Lakes' largest colony of cormorants, looks like a wintry apocalypse. There are no trees now, just a few guano-spattered snags. This is where cormorants first settled in the park in 1990. They now number about 30,000.

WASHINGTON–Airplane collisions with birds have more than doubled at 13 major U.S. airports since 2000, according to Federal Aviation Administration data released for the first time yesterday.

The FAA list of wildlife strikes, published on the Internet, details more than 89,000 incidents since 1990, including 28 cases since 2000 in which collisions with birds or other animals such as deer on the runway were so severe that the aircraft was considered destroyed.