Photographs show a bear trapped beneath a combine.
The pictures displayed above stem from an encounter between a combine and bear that took place on a rented corn field in East Farmington Township, Wisconsin, on 26 October 2006. Farmer Troy DeRosier, from the west-central Wisconsin town of Osceola, was harvesting corn that day when his combine fell into a five-foot-deep hole that turned out to bethe den of a 216-pound bear. 'I started digging, and I could hear this heavy breathing,' he said. 'Then we saw this paw come out.'Unfortunately, the bear could not be extricated from beneath the combine (which was loaded down with 5-1/2 tons of corn), so a local hunter, acting under directions from the local Department of Natural Resources (DNR) office, shot and killed it. A crowd of about 20 people gathered to witness the scene, one of whom presumably snapped the photos shown here and sent them out over the Internet.Later versions of the e-mail claimed the photos stemmed from farms near various towns around Illinois (e.g., Washburn, Decatur, Kewanee), prompting denials from officials with that state's Department of Natural Resources, who said Illinois has no black bear population.A similar incident involving a bear and a combine took place just one week later on a farm near Osseo, Wisconsin.
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