It is something like a soap opera, though one with a very short season. Over just a few warm months, its rotund cast appears after a long winter’s sleep and descends on Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. There, the players scuffle for dominance, rear cubs, sometimes share spoils, and — most important — grow comically, almost absurdly fat on the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.
The bears become so mammoth that the park for five years has run an annual contest to name the most blubbery bear of all. Fat Bear Week, which began October 2nd, has a March Madness-style bracket and voting on Facebook, where the park provides before-and-after shots and a gushing stream of fat puns. The bears can gain two pounds of fat a day funneling fish ahead of hibernation, resulting in jaw-dropping physical transformations.
But Fat Bear Week is only the gimmicky finale of a summertime reality show watched obsessively by a swelling stable of fans around the world. Explore.org, a philanthropic multimedia organization, live-streams a “bear cam” from several spots along the Brooks River. When it launched in 2012, it had about 20,000 unique sessions a day (that is, the number of times someone started watching it); now it has about 80,000, “making it the most popular of explore.org’s various webcams,” said Courtney Johnson, the group’s social media director.
There is no shortage of live animal cams, but few offer the same breadth of characters. The park says dozens of bears, which aren’t typically social animals, regularly fish the falls. But because the park is remote and expensive to visit, few people see them in person. Bear cam watchers say the footage provides a mesmerizing view of bears as individuals that must employ varying strategies to navigate a crowd and win the resources they need to survive.
“Some people get really emotionally invested in one bear succeeding,” said Cat Yurkovich, who always has the bear cam running on one of the two computer monitors she uses for her administrative job at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. “Some keep Excel spreadsheets on when certain bears return and when they’re last seen. People get really into data.” Chez, an artist, said she misses the bear cam terribly when it’s off for hibernation. Once it revs up in June, it’s always on at her home office, and she starts churning out her “Brooks River Tattle-er,” an online publication she described as “gossip from the bears’ point of view.”
Although she is a full-time devotee, Chez said she finds Fat Bear Week thrilling. So do others: Fans make digital “posters” for their favorite fatsos, “the same way you would in an election in high school,” she said. Because she is editor of the unofficial bear publication, Chez produces posters for all candidates. But she does not hesitate to say that she’s rooting for bear 747, an animal she said “gets along with almost everybody” and is “humongous.” Mike Fitz, a former Katmai park ranger who is now an Explore.org naturalist, has also endorsed 747 (whose number, the park insists, was randomly assigned, despite his similarity to a jumbo jet). “Your Fat Bear Week vote can be based on any number of factors,” Fitz wrote on his website. But 747, he said, is “a bear who is both the fattest and the largest, two traits that are not mutually exclusive.”
You can vote for your favorite fattest bear by visiting the Katmai National Park Facebook page. But hurry! Voting closes soon and then you’ll just have to bide your time until next year.
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Photo Credit: Michael J Thompson / Shutterstock.com