Fat Bear Week is officially underway. The 10th annual contest will determine 2024’s best hefty hibernator currently chowing down on salmon in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. From October 2-8, millions of people tune into Explore.org’s live streams overlooking Brooks River—one of the region’s most popular spots for brown bears to chow down and bulk up ahead of the winter. More than 1.3 million people cast their ballot last year, and relied on these video feeds to catch a glimpse of the bears in action. That puts a lot of responsibility on people like BJ Kirschhoffer, a conservation technologist working with Explore.org to ensure cameras are properly placed, installed, and maintained not just for Fat Bear Week, but for wildlife regions around the world.
“You know, there really isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to where our cameras are mounted,” Kirschoffer tells Popular Science. “We can bolt stuff down to rocks if there are rocks there. If it’s just sand, we’ve got big screws that we send into the earth to hold our stuff in place. We’ve sort of become experts in just being adaptable and working in a place where there’s no hardware store.”
But Kirschoffer says his team is “pretty lucky” at Brooks Falls, given its logistics are more straightforward than some of Explore.org’s other feed locations, such as underwater coral reefs or owl nests. The national park has a long history of tourists visiting both to fish and peep at the bears. An elevated platform built near the river provides a lookout point for people (and keeps them separated from the hungry predators), so Kirschoffer’s crew took advantage of that for Fat Bear Week by mounting their cameras directly on the structure.
“The cam views are the same view you might have if you’re standing there right at Brooks Falls,” he says.
Even so, the annual event’s famed fat bears don’t live…
Read the full article here
