Glacier 'bearcam' a hit with viewers
A black bear denned in a cottonwood tree in Glacier National Park yawns as it wakes from a long winter’s nap. (Screenshot courtesy of Glacier National Park)
Glacier National Park’s latest webcam is its most popular yet, but check it out quickly — the main attraction will soon be hitting the woods.
This week the park focused a webcam on a hollow cottonwood tree that’s home to a black bear. The bear has been lounging in the hole, basking in the sunshine about 100 feet in the air. Bears typically hang around their dens when they first awake from their winter slumber.
Males, subadults, solitary females and females with yearlings or 2-year-olds usually leave the vicinity of their den within a week of emergence, while females with newborn cubs can remain in the general vicinity of the den for several more weeks, the park noted on its Facebook page.
The bear was first sighted March 23. The park put up the webcam on Wednesday. Park biologists aren’t sure if it’s a male or female. No cubs have been seen. Cubs weighing less than half a pound are born in the middle of the winter denning period, usually between mid-January and early February, park biologists note. A mother bear will typically give birth to one to three cubs at a time.
By the time a mother bear and her cubs are ready to emerge into spring, the cubs typically weigh around 5 pounds. Young bears grow very quickly and can weigh around 80 pounds by their first birthday.
There are two views of the tree. One is a wide view and another a zoomed in. Park spokeswoman Lauren Alley said the zoomed-in bearcam had 37,000 views on Thursday and 12,000 views on the wide side. That was the most of any Park Service page for the day, even the Park Service’s main NPS.gov landing page.
Viewers from across the world have watched the bear, including viewers from Namibia and China, Alley said.
Alley noted that the bearcam is educational too — people can see that bears are awake, and as a result, folks need to take the usual precautions, like keeping a clean camp, properly storing food in bear-resistant containers, carrying bear spray and properly taking care of garbage. With the snowy winter, bears are sure to drop into valley floors looking for food, as the mountains won’t green up for weeks until the snow melts.
The park has 13 webcams. Some are temporary, like the snow family cam, which trains in on a “family” of snowmen in the lawn of park headquarters. The webcam at Goat Haunt goes offline for the winter when the power is turned off.
Other webcams are at developed areas like Two Medicine, Lake McDonald, St. Mary, Many Glacier and most recently, Logan Pass. The only backcountry camera is on Apgar Mountain.
The bearcam is not the first webcam to feature wildlife. At St. Mary, the park trained a camera on an osprey nest near the visitor center a few years ago. The ospreys, however, moved to a different nesting location. The St. Mary webcam in particular often catches wildlife, particularly elk grazing out in the flats. The Apgar webcam caught a moose earlier this year.
There were 2,255,700 Glacier Park webcam views between March 30, 2017 and March 30, 2018, Alley said. The webcam page on its website is the most popular — 17 percent of all traffic goes there. The Logan Pass camera that looks toward Going-to-the-Sun Mountain gets thousands of views per day. It has had 379,318 visits since it was put into place mid-July, 2017, Alley said.
The Glacier Park Conservancy funded the webcams at Logan Pass.