Robert Biggs, 69 of Paradise, Calif., had a pretty wild encounter when he went out for a hike on Monday. Hiking near Whiskey Flats, Biggs stopped to watch a mother bear and her cub by a stream, but was jumped from behind by another animal when he turned to leave.

The California man wasn't attacked by a bear, but a mountain lion. Biggs said that the mountain lion jumped on his back, forcing him to fall to his knees. "He grabbed me from behind and knocked me to the ground," Biggs told the Huffington Post. "I was on my knees. I had my rock pick out because I was on a steep incline, and I smashed the cat in the head with it. He screamed , but didn't let go."

Fortunately for Biggs, the mother bear was only 40 feet away to help him. "That's when a blur on my left side grabbed the lion by its throat," said Biggs of the mother bear. "I heard tremendous screeching, some growling noises."

Western Australian authorities have spotted a shark in the same area where 33-year-old Peter Kurmann was attacked and killed.

Police say Mr Kurmann, from the town of Vasse, near Busselton, had anchored his boat about 1.7 kilometres off Stratham Beach and was diving for crayfish with his brother when he was attacked just after 9:00am (AWST).

The shark is believed to be a four-metre great white, and a patrol plane has spotted a similar sized shark south of the attack site, about 600 metres offshore.

Tony Cappelluti from the Department of Fisheries says a boat has gone to the area.

"We will attempt to take it. Whether we destroy it is an issue that'll be decided at the time by the relevant people able to give that order," he said.

Mr Kurmann's body was brought to shore two hours after the attack, along with the boat he and his brother had been using.

At least 10 more dolphins stranded themselves on the beaches of Cape Cod this week, a Cape-based animal welfare group said. The strandings raised the annual total to more than 200 in just three months, an unusually high number that has left scientists scrambling to find a cause.

"This week we had 10 common dolphins strand in various locations including Brewster, Wellfleet, and Orleans," Michael Booth, spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said. "We had four strand on Monday - one in Wellfleet and three in Brewster."

Six more dolphins stranded Tuesday -- two in Wellfleet, three in Brewster, and one in Orleans, Booth said.

Canada: Goose Grove, Newfoundland and Labrador - Fifty-five-year-old Louis Reardon got the shock of his life early Thursday when he leapt out of bed to his son's cries of "Polar bear!" as a large male bear broke into their home in northern Newfoundland.

"He had the door busted open to the dining room with his two front paws and his head in through the door," Reardon said from tiny Goose Cove, just south of St. Anthony, N.L.

"I mean, it frightened the wits right clean out of me, to be that close to a polar bear."

Reardon's son Damien, 29, had heard a ruckus and flicked on the light to discover the animal. Polar bears are notoriously aggressive when cornered, and Damien slammed on a table trying to frighten the intruder as his father raced for a shotgun.

"A polar bear doesn't usually back down," Louis Reardon said. "If he came in the house, God knows what he would have done before he went out."

His other son, his daughter, her three young children and her boyfriend had all been sleeping when the commotion started just after 4 a.m.

A bizarre creature that washed ashore last week in Folly Beach, S.C., sparked speculation in the area and on the Internet that a dead sea monster might have been discovered. The tan-brown animal with greenish patches was strange enough, but what really baffled beachgoers was its massive size and the dinosaur-like bony plates on its sides. It's not clear just how long it was, but photos suggest it exceeded 10 feet.
Like many washed-up carcasses it carried both a salty stench and an air of mystery. Speculation ran rampant, with commenters suggesting that the creature was everything from a dinosaurian sea monster to a toxin-spawned mutation to a chupacabra.

Scientists, however, were somewhat more skeptical. One of the first to identify the monster was Dr. Shane Boylan of the South Carolina Aquarium. Two big clues allowed Boylan to identify the fish more or less immediately: the animal's shape and distinctive bony plates.

Sickly, underweight bottlenose dolphins living and dying in the northern Gulf of Mexico may be the result of exposure to oil that gushed into the water after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.

The oil disaster occurred April 20, 2010, when the Macando oil well blew out. During the three months it took to contain the leak emanating from the broken riser pipe at the well, about 4.9 million barrels of oil - or about 205 million gallons - gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, according to government estimates.

Barataria Bay in the Gulf was particularly affected by the oil for a prolonged period, the researchers noted. So to get a bead on dolphin health, they conducted comprehensive physicals of 32 live dolphins in Barataria Bay during the summer of 2011. They found that many of these dolphins were underweight, anemic, had low blood sugar and/or some symptoms of liver and lung disease. In addition, nearly 50 percent showed abnormally low levels of hormones known to help with the body's response to stress, metabolism and immune function.

Specifically, the team saw low levels of the stress hormones cortisol and aldosterone, which are released by the adrenal glands.

The United States and Canada just basked in an unusually mild winter. Temperatures ranked fourth warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many spring flowers are already blooming. But did the birds notice? Definitely, according to the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), an annual tally of bird sightings collected by amateur birders across the United States and Canada. The numbers reveal that the snowy owl population in particular boomed and that many other birds showed up in more northerly latitudes than usual.

GBBC, now in its 15th year, is a joint effort by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, and the National Audubon Society, headquartered in New York City. This year, birders, who were instructed to identify and record whatever birds they happened to see in their yards and neighborhoods between 17 and 20 February, tallied 17.4 million individual sightings. Pat Leonard, GBBC's director of communications, says that it's unclear how many individuals took part because each observer can submit more than one sighting checklist, but he estimates that between 65,000 and 70,000 volunteers participated.

Ornithologists working with GBBC analyzed the data and found a number of unexpected trends. One of the biggest surprises, says Marshall Iliff, an ornithologist at the Cornell lab who co-authored the report and leads a smaller, year-long project similar to GBBC called eBird, was an explosion in sightings of the snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus). In November, reports began trickling in to eBird that the snowy owl, which primarily lives north of the Arctic Circle, was showing up in unexpectedly large numbers in the United States and southern Canada, and GBBC's tally backs that up. Observers reported 428 sightings of the owl, which is four times the number from the same time last year. "This snowy owl thing is pretty surprising," Iliff says.

Remember New Year's Eve 2010 when thousands of birds mysteriously dropped from the sky over Beebe, Arkansas? Well, the mystery has been solved.

Last May, a crew from the National Geographic Channel dropped by the NewsChannel5 Weather Office. They wanted to see what important information we had found regarding the bird deaths over Beebe. Indeed, my research indicated a unique radar signature several thousand feet above the birds just as the mass deaths were occurring. With the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a unique weather phenomenon was blamed for startling the birds and causing the mayhem that resulted in the demise of thousands of birds that night.

On Thursday, an all-new National Geographic Special will debut explaining the Beebe event as well as several other mass animal deaths that occurred last winter. The show, "Omens of the Apocalypse," airs on the National Geographic Channel at 10 p.m.

Here's the original story from last January: Something weird happened in Beebe, Arkansas just before midnight on January 1st, 2010. Thousands of red-winged blackbirds literally fell from the sky throughout the town. Most of the birds were dead. A few were alive, but lthough barely. Results from preliminary testing released today by the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission Veterinary Diagnostic Lab show that red-winged blackbirds died from massive body trauma.

New research has linked springtime die-offs of honeybees critical for pollinating food crops - part of the mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder - with technology for planting corn coated with insecticides.

The study, published in ACS' journal Environmental Science and Technology, appears on the eve of spring planting seasons in some parts of Europe where farmers use the technology and widespread deaths of honeybees have occurred in the past.

In the study, Andrea Tapparo and colleagues explain that seeds coated with so-called neonicotinoid insecticides went into wide use in Europe in the late 1990s. The insecticides are among the most widely used in the world, popular because they kill insects by paralyzing nerves but have lower toxicity for other animals.

Almost immediately, beekeepers observed large die-offs of bees that seemed to coincide with mid-March to May corn planting. Scientists thought this might be due to particles of insecticide made airborne by the pneumatic drilling machines used for planting.

A man has been taken to hospital with a gash to his lower leg after being attacked by a shark at a Gold Coast beach this evening.

Lifeguards believe the 20-year-old engineering student who was surfing at Nobby Beach may have been attacked by a small bull shark about 5.05pm. *

He suffered a deep wound to his lower left leg.

Gold Coast chief lifeguard Warren Young told brisbanetimes.com.au lifesavers were on the scene within minutes and were able to stem the bleeding, before ambulance paramedics arrived to take the man to Gold Coast Hospital.