Young bear spotted relaxing on a hammock in a Vermont yard

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Noah and Kristen Dweck have seen a number of black bears around their home in Vermont but this was a first: a bear relaxing on their hammock.

Noah Dweck took iPhone video of two young bears in their yard in Waitsfield on Tuesday with one sitting on the swinging hammock before he shooed them away.

“It was adorable. It was a funny sight,” he told The Associated Press.

Dweck said he was sitting at a desk with the screen doors open in their home near the Sugarbush ski resort when he heard the jingling of the hammock. He then realized there was no wind.

“So immediately I knew it was the bears,” he said. He ran upstairs and looked out the window and saw one bear looking curiously at the other bear who was hanging around on the hammock, he said. He took some iphone video and then scared the bears away. Burlington TV station WPTZ first reported on the sighting.

“We live in a very active bear basin. The bears are very used to human contact so I’m assuming they have found other people’s hammocks before," Dweck said. “To be honest, it was pretty impressive that he didn’t fall off, or she didn’t fall off the hammock, and kind of knew how to do it. It was quite funny to see.”

Vermont has a healthy black bear population and sightings of and incidents with the animals have increased in recent years.