The bear cams at Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park went live Thursday morning to kick off their fourth season. A few dozen brown bears will do bear things: eat fish, trail new cubs and squabble for territory.
An incredible multitude of viewers get to connect intimately with the creatures – and each other – from half a world away.
The National Park Service says up to two dozen bears have been seen on the camera at once in previous years, eating fish and securing salmon-catching spots.
The three cameras are the result of a $150,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation's Explore.org, which funds cameras and other projects in locations around the world. One camera is located at the falls itself. A nearby camera captures the action at the lower river, while a third is underwater, giving viewers a fisheye look at what it's like to become a bear's dinner.
Explore.org has a page where viewers can keep an eye on all three cameras at once, and even snap photos for sharing on social media.
Park ranger Roy Wood, the chief of interpretation for Katmai National Park and Preserve, has studied the cams' audience through Google Analytics. He says the cameras drew 16 million viewers last year from every country on the planet except Syria and Yemen.
There are even 45 people from Vatican City tuning in, said Wood, who hopes the Pope is among them.
Last year, India jumped up the list of bear watchers and now represents the third-largest audience, with nearly a half a million people watching. Pakistan delivers the fifth-most viewers.
"That was really surprising to us," said Wood, "because we don't see many people from India or Pakistan that visit the park in person."
Relatively few people make the expensive trip to Katmai. Wood says the logistics, which include booking a float plane and either camping or reserving a lodge, limit visitors to mostly upper-class Americans and Canadians.
But the bear cams "completely upend that" disparity, Wood said. They make the bears accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
A visit to the comments section on the bear cam site suggests that these are more than just casual viewers.
Bear watchers club
In the days before the cameras go live, the bear cam's comment feed feels like the long bus ride to a well-loved summer camp.
Returners greet each other and welcome newcomers. They relive last summer's memories, share photos and speculate about the scene soon to unfold. And they beseech their expert guides, Ranger Roy and Ranger Mike: "Are we there yet?"
One of the returning viewers is Dicky Neely, a 68-year-old artist and writer who lives in Corpus Christi, Texas. Like his fellow bear cam devotees, Neely is eager for a live view of Brooks Camp. "I'm itching to see the bears again," he said in an interview.
Neely said it was an interaction between a mother bear, Holly, and her cub that first captured his attention on the cam last summer. "The cub was jumping all around, just obviously so happy to be a little bear and to be alive there," he recalls. "I got such a kick out of that. That hooked me."
A former surfer, Neely is disabled and ventures beyond his house mainly through the Internet. During the summer, he watches the Brooks Camp bears every day, often for hours.
Though he's not usually one for online chatting, Neely said he has made some friends through the bear cams. He has corresponded and shared artwork with a German named Juergen who has gained some fame within the community as a dedicated bear watcher.
Neely also enjoys being able to ask questions and get answers from the rangers. "I've learned so much about bears from those guys," he said. "They seem to be very dedicated to what they're doing. I have a lot of respect for them."
Observers become participants
Wood said the online community has transformed his summers in Brooks Camp.
In pre-cam days, he said, he would talk with 70 to 100 visitors per hour on the platforms. Now those same presentations can be livestreamed to viewers all over the world. For some of the July chats, 12,000 to 15,000 people tune in.
"The first time we saw those numbers just ticking up like that it was kind of scary because you're used to dealing with 15-20 people in front of you at any one time," Wood said. "To see thousands just brings a different feel to it. It's pretty exciting."
Wood said he can often reach more people in an hour-long video-chat than Brooks Camp will see in an entire season.
The larger audience is not the only way the cams have affected life at Brooks Camp. Wood said some dedicated viewers are so observant that they begin to act as citizen scientists.
"Some of them are just amazing at their bear identification," he said. "They're picking up on things that a trained observer at Brooks Camp doesn't always pick up on."
That is good news for the rangers; the thousands of extra eyes mean they don't miss as much interesting behavior among the park's 50 to 70 bears.
Neely says he can pick out about a dozen bears by name. His favorite bear, the sow Holly, became the central character in one of last summer's main dramas at Brooks Camp.
In June, a cub was abandoned by its mother and was later seen with a different sow. A cam viewer visiting the park at the time took photos that helped rangers determine that Holly had indeed adopted the cub.
Adoption is extremely rare among bears, and rangers and viewers devoted pages of blog posts and comments to analyzing Holly's actions. Why would she adopt a yearling cub that could compete with her younger cub? Would she still have both cubs the following spring? (As Ranger Mike wrote in a June 3 blog post, the answer is yes!)
Later that summer, the same viewer photographed a sow called Divot with a snare cutting into her neck. Within a couple of days the rangers and a biologist had launched a successful mission to free Divot, marking the first time a bear had been tranquilized in Katmai since the 1970s. Naturally, that mission was recorded on video and viewed by thousands.
Both Wood and Neely believe that interactions like these help people become invested in the well-being of the park and its bears.
"I think it helps a lot," Neely said. "I don't know how you could watch those bears for any length of time and still regard them as the dangerous, killer, ferocious animals eager to rip humans apart... Because you can see their normal behavior is not always like that."
Several viewers have been inspired to volunteer at the park this summer, said Wood, who wishes he could enable even more cam viewers to participate in the park's data collection.
"There aren't many people who are moved to action by just watching TV," he said. "The cams are moving people to action, and we're all very proud of that."
Bear cams are here to stay
Each year the cams become more sophisticated. This year technicians will add a powerful directional microphone at Brooks Falls to pipe natural sounds -- hopefully not tourists' chatter, said Wood -- into peoples' living rooms. Another upgrade is a mobile Wi-Fi unit that will enable rangers to broadcast from anywhere in Brooks Camp.
Due to the cams' success and popularity, the park has extended its agreement with Explore.org to keep the bear cams in place another 10 years.
Judging by the throng of viewers obsessively refreshing the webpage this week, the bear-cam people are here to stay as well.
http://www.nps.gov/katm/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm