Glacier Park's 'bearcam' a hit with viewers

A black “bearcam” in Glacier National Park has proven to be a hit with online viewers, garnering a whopping 6 percent of all National Park Service online traffic in the past week, noted Park spokeswoman Lauren Alley.

The Park Service has more than 400 websites.

Last week, the Park trained a webcam in a hollow cottonwood tree that’s home to a black bear. The bear has been lounging in the hole, basking in the sunshine on sunny days about 100 feet in the air. Bears typically hang around their dens when they first awake from their winter slumber.

As of presstime, the bear was still at the den, but not always visible. It’s been snowing on and off in Glacier since Sunday.

Males, subadults, solitary females, and females with yearlings or two-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 on March 23. The Park put up the webcam on March 28. Park biologists aren’t sure if it’s a male or female, yet. 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 five pounds. Young bears grow very quickly and can weigh around 80 pounds by their first birthdays.

There are two views on the tree. One is a wide view and another a zoomed in view. Alley said the zoomed in bear cam had 37,000 views on March 29 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 for real 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.

There were 2,255,700 Glacier Park webcam views at Glacier’s 13 webcams between March 30, 2017 and March 30, 2018, Alley said. All of Glacier’s webcams can be viewed at https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm