Bears in Brooks Falls Live Cam

A brown bear stands in the Brooks River with a salmon in its jaws, in Katmai National Park in south-west Alaska. The camera watches a short stretch of water between two lakes.

Sockeye run up this river in July in their millions, and the bears gather at the falls a little upstream to take them out of the air. A second run comes through in September, when the fish are spawned out and easier to catch, and the bears eat to put on weight that has to last a winter.

The park was set aside in 1918 after the eruption of Novarupta six years earlier, the largest anywhere in the twentieth century, which buried a valley in ash. The bears came later as the reason people visit, and an annual vote on which of them has fattened most now draws millions of ballots.