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Popular Katmai Bear Cameras Return for the 3rd Year

Courtesy: Katmai National Park & Preserve Facebook

The Katmai National Park and Preserve in partnership with Explore.org began rebroadcasting live web camera feeds of the local brown bears along the Brooks River in June. The cameras went down this past winter due to technical difficulties, but have been reactivated over the past few months. There are currently 8 cameras in operation, one of which displays an underwater view of the passing salmon and other marine life in the river. The Annenberg Foundation’s Explore.org helped set up the feeds in 2012, and they continue to fund the project, which is based in the park’s Brooks Camp. Diane Chung is the Katmai National Park and Preserve Superintendent. She says the cameras have garnered massive attention while allowing people to watch from the convenience of their computer screens.

 

It actually allows a lot of people to see what’s going on in the park who can’t make it. Last year we had 7 million people view the bear cams.

Chung says Katmai National Park Ranger Roy Wood initially tried setting up the camera feeds, but he ran into funding shortages and technical challenges. Explore.org’s Charles Annenberg Weingarten then stepped in to fund the cameras, much like it has done for other nature themed webcams across the globe. She says the cameras have even drawn online viewers’ to visit the parks to see the bears in person.
 

There’s actually people who viewed the cameras last summer that actually are showing up this summer to see the bears in person.

Chung says the cameras are attended by volunteers who maneuver the cameras to positions with the best visuals. She says the volunteers carry out the operations in four month increments. Jeanne Roy, now a Katmai Administrative Support Assistant, volunteered to operate the cameras last year and answered user questions on the camera chat boards. She says the experience was exciting because she was able to share it with so many people.

For me it was really exciting to be able to interact with many thousands online, and share these bears with them because it’s a much wider audience than has ever seen them before.

Roy says she operated the cameras from home using a computer interface, which allowed her to zoom in on active areas of bear activity. She says her previous experience working at Brooks Camp allowed her to answer viewer questions regarding the bears’ behavior, and a few worried concerns.

A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to view bears like this, so there’s a lot of interpretation of bear behavior that goes on, and sometimes it can be simple. Sometimes cubs will run away, and other bears or a mother in the vicinity will react to one another.

The cameras are also accompanied by blog posts on Explore.org, which give viewers a more in-depth look at specific bears. Park rangers, who work directly with the bears, use the blog posts to provide viewers with brown bear narratives by assigning numbers to the local recognized bears. The cameras can be viewed by visiting Explore.org and clicking on the brown bears video tab, and the blog posts can be viewed at bears.explore.org.
 


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