By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-04 10:09:29 | Updated at 2024-10-07 20:35:04
3 days ago
U.S.|The Bold. The Beautiful. The Fat Bear.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/fat-bear-week.html
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Ten years in, Fat Bear Week has drawn millions of viewers to a live webcam in Alaska to follow along and vote for the chonkiest brown bear at Katmai National Park.
Oct. 4, 2024, 5:40 a.m. ET
Voters have a lot to weigh: leadership qualities, policy agenda, experience. But over the past decade, one race has been defined by the amount of wild salmon that can be smashed into a mouth.
You might call them single-issue voters, but really they’re just voting for the bulkiest bear on the ballot.
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Fat Bear Week, the annual contest that celebrates feeding season at Katmai National Park in Alaska, began as one-day experiment for park rangers to engage with visitors. It has spiraled into an annual weeklong competition with a March Madness-like bracket and mentality.
It’s all thanks to a live webcam at Brooks Falls, a favorite salmon run in the park, that allows virtual visitors to observe competitors like Grazer, Chunk, the aptly named 747 and about a dozen others feasting on the local delicacy, growing from runty to hulk-like in a matter of months.
“There are very few places in the world where you can go watch wild bears and know them as individuals,” said Mike Fitz, a former park ranger who founded the contest in 2014. The contest, he said, “celebrates the success of brown bears and it tells their stories — the challenges and the difficulties they face to get fat and survive.”
