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KATMAI NATIONAL PARK, Alaska — It's like spring training for bears. Only it's the end of summer, and the goal is getting fat rather than fit.
Kamai National Park in Alaska provides an important habitat for salmon and is home to thousands of brown bears. Each year, around the first week of October, the park hosts its popular Fat Bear Week. The weeklong online "tournament" focuses on several individual bears getting themselves in bear-bod shape for the winter and vying for the title of Fat Bear of the Year.
But if you want to scout out some of this year's potential nominees, Explore.org has a camera running 24/7 at Brooks Falls, where you can watch bears go fishing just about all day. It's currently by far the website's most popular livecam.
"Watch salmon leaping up the falls, while brown bears compete with each other for the best fishing spots. The largest and most successful bears can catch and eat more than 30 salmon (over 120 pounds) per day! Bears are most abundant at Brooks Falls in late June and July during the sockeye salmon migration, but also keep an eye out for bald eagles, lots of gulls, and maybe even the occasional wolf trying to partake in the salmon buffet," the channel states.
