Get closer to nature with these amazing wildlife webcams
Get closer to nature with these amazing wildlife webcams, Maybe you follow Fat Bear Week and those famous salmon-slurping bears at Katmai National Park—maybe you've even watched them live through the park's webcams (that would make two of us!). Those fish-guzzling grizzlies took wildlife webcams mainstream, with thousands of daily viewers getting in on the Alaska scene from the comfort of their office chairs and living-room couches. Incredible nature, live with audio, can be right in the palm of our hands.
Luckily for us city folk, those famous bears fishing the lip of Brook Falls are far from the only wildlife we can bring (safely!) into our homes. For a dash of feel-good frolics and total cute-itude—and maybe even a little wildlife education, from the endangered California condor to the beluga whale—here are the best wildlife webcams to watch, delight in, and enjoy.
1. Explore.org
Those fat bears aren't the only ones having fun at explore.org—at any moment, you can watch a nesting bald eagle or guess whether or not that sleeping panda is about to fall out of that tree. There's livestreams of kitten rescue sanctuaries, underwater reefs, puffin loafing ledges (and burrows!), and more. Explore.org runs more than 100 livecams, so there's always somebody fluffy, feathery, or feisty putting on a show.
2. National Park Service
I don't know about you, but if there were a national parks TV channel, I would be watching it 24/7. NPS webcams come close—you can watch everything from the billowing smoke of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to the dancing kelp off the shores of Channel Islands National Park. At Yellowstone National Park, you can watch the geysers erupt (they even come with timetables, so you know when to break for a snack) or even keep an eye on traffic. The vehicle kind. And the bison kind.
The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., runs about half a dozen livecams at any given time, mostly of the zoo's biggest superstars: pandas, lions, elephants, black-footed ferrets, and—my personal eccentric favorite—the mole rat. They run 24/7, so you might wanna do nighttime checks on your nocturnal or crepuscular pals, like Shaka, Jumbe, Shera, and Amahle, the resident lions.Fun, slightly weird fact: The mole rat can move each of its front teeth separately. (That doesn't sound useful, but it must be!)
4. San Diego Zoo
The San Diego Zoo runs more than a dozen webcams, from 7:30am to 7:30pm, Pacific Time. Most are live, like the koala cam and the polar bear cam, though some are prerecorded, like the panda cam. Check out the burrowing owl cam, which you'd think would be difficult to film—but they've got cams above and below ground for a guaranteed show.
Note: Ever seen a California condor? Maybe not—there are only 500 in the world, mainly due to habitat loss, lead poisoning, poaching, power-line accidents, and DDT. (Prior to conservation efforts, numbers were down to 22.) Susil and Antiki, two adult condors at the San Diego Zoo, hatched a chick in March, and the family fun can be watched via condor cam until the chick fledges in August.
Easily one of the finest aquariums in the nation, Monterey Bay Aquarium has gifted us a slew of webcams, and not just ones underwater. You can watch the playful antics of sea otters, mellow out to the hypnotic drifting of jellies, predict where the crabs will scurry, or address your fears and see how long you can stare at the shark cam. There's even an open sea cam, if you'd like to scope out the goings-on of the California coast.The Monterey Bay Aquarium has gone further with the fun and put it to a soundrack: Krill Waves Radio on YouTube offers hours of lo-fi hip-hop beats set to hours of cleaner shrimp. Hours of squid. Hours of jellyfish. Hours of otters. All floating and relaxing their days away—I think I speak for the lot of us when I say: jealous.
Birding is hot. Birding is in. (I say this as someone who spends almost as much money on birdseed as groceries.) The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has cams for your standard backyard birds—like the ones who come to the feeder cams, aka woodpeckers, cardinals, and other songbirds—and then they've got cams for species you've probably never seen or heard of before, like rufuous motmots and hellgate ospreys (what a name!). The Panama Fruit Feeders cam is especially vibrant and wild; it's where you can watch toucan TV, proverbially speaking, amongst other colorful flying friends.
At any time, you can peek into the Georgia Aquarium's 6.3-million-gallon tank called the Ocean Voyager (if you're there in person, yes, you'll be on TV). The aquarium also offers us at-home couch potatoes livecam access to puffins, sea lions, jellies, beluga whales, and more incredible creatures roaming their Southern halls.
So, no, you didn't go to the aquarium or the zoo today—you went to both.Jacqueline is a travel, nature, and science writer based in Wisconsin. Follow her work on Yahoo Creators—or find it in the wild at publications like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Travel + Leisure, and more.
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