Sometimes you just need a moment to take a load off -- especially if you're a black bear who stumbles upon a hammock on a nice summer day.
Noah Dweck and his wife Kristen are used to seeing black bears near their Vermont home. But they'd never seen bears as comfortable as two who entered their yard this week.
The Waitsfield residents were inside their house on Tuesday when they heard the "jingling" of their hammock, as if someone had climbed into it. They looked outside to find two young black bears on their property – one playing in the yard, the other relaxing in the hammock.
"It was adorable," Dweck told The Associated Press. "It was a funny sight."
After grabbing a quick video of the bear gently rocking on the hammock, Dweck shooed the animals away.
"I had to scare them off because you're not really supposed to let them too close to your house," he said. "You do want to tell them to go away."
At first the bears were unfazed, even with Dweck's stern warnings of "Guys, get off the hammock," and "That's not for you!" But after a few moments, they relented and went on their way.
"You probably could think of the conversation in the woods above the hammock was, 'Hey, come check this out. I want to show you something.' And the other one was just curiously sitting there watching him get in and see what was going on," said Dweck. "And when I came out, they both kind of just looked at me and say, 'Hey, what's up?' There was no -- they weren't scared. They weren't trying to run away until I yelled at them."
Dweck said the lounging bear left a lasting impression on him.
"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," he told the AP. "It was quite funny to see."