Deborah Weisberg

A Butler County, Pa., woman feels lucky to be alive, having survived a mauling by a black bear on the deck of her Butler Township home March 5 in an encounter she calls “terrifying.”
Lee Ann Galante, 55, was attacked by a sow at around 8:30 p.m. soon after she let her 8-pound Pomeranian, Smokie, into the backyard for a break. It began with Smokie barking at a bird feeder at the side of the house and a “terrible commotion” that Galante presumed involved a deer.

An alligator believed to have survived a Pennsylvania winter in the wild has perished in a fire at a suburban sanctuary here.
Neo was one of more than 70 gators, turtles, salamanders, tarantulas and other animals that died in the Feb. 26 blaze at the non-profit Nate’s Reptile Rescue in South Park, which Allegheny County police say housed about 100 exotics. No cause had been announced by the county fire marshal as of March 3.

If only alligators could talk.
It might solve the mystery of how a reptile presumed to be Neo – a juvenile that went missing in Westmoreland County, Pa., last summer – has spent the past seven months in the wild. If it is Neo, the young gator reappeared, a little worse for wear, near the Kiskiminetas River in Westmoreland County in early February.

A western Pennsylvania man was sentenced in federal court in January for the fatal shooting of a mature bald eagle in a Washington County residential community last May.
Rodney Thomas, 51, of Canonsburg, pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and was given two years’ probation and 50 hours of community service at a bird or wildlife-related facility for the killing, which occurred in Cherry Valley Lakeview Estates, Mount Pleasant Township.