Fat Bear Week Has Its Own Dedicated Community of Fat Bear Fanatics

After a summer time of opulence and extra comes the lean time—the lengthy, darkish winter, when assets should be hoarded and stretched. No one is aware of this higher than the fats bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.

After just a few months of plucking salmon from glittering rivers by the 1000’s and making snacks out of berries, herbs, and small mammals, Alaska’s brown bears have, by now, roughly doubled their physique weight in preparation for the lengthy sleep of hibernation. The fatter the bear, the higher the percentages of surviving Alaska’s punishing winters, which final from roughly October to March. Important, sure. But the fatter the bear, the higher their odds of taking dwelling a prize of equal or higher worth to securing their very own survival: being topped the victor of Fat Bear Week by a neighborhood of fats bear admirers that’s among the many most healthful locations on the web.

It’s powerful to pinpoint precisely when the people began loving the fats bears, however the Katmai park rangers began noticing the extraordinary curiosity the pound-packing Ursus arctos generated in about 2014, after they started printing out earlier than and after images of among the 2,000-odd bears that roam the park in order that guests may vote on one to be topped the chunkiest. As the competition’s recognition and renown surged, it will definitely expanded into its present, digital format, which permits anybody with an web connection to vote for the beefiest bear in a single-elimination bracket match. This yr’s tourney started final week (with the addition of Fat Bear Junior), and Fat Bear Week culminates on the competition’s last day—Fat Bear Tuesday—when a winner is topped the “Fattest Bear” of the Brooks River.

Humans’ intense love for the beefy bears has given rise to a loving and devoted web fan neighborhood that coalesces on the Facebook web page for discover.org, a nonprofit group that maintains a number of reside nature cams of the Brooks Falls brown bears. Prodding at this subculture to attempt to higher perceive what, precisely, it’s concerning the bears that retains the people so transfixed garners sweetly apparent solutions, like attempting to ask somebody to explain why they smile when using a rollercoaster or just like the style of cake.

“When I’m watching the bears, I find myself going to a tranquil place. It’s incredibly beautiful and peaceful,” one lady, Secret Meier, stated through Facebook Messenger. “I laugh watching Otis, who’s much older, as he sits in what I call, affectionately, his office. He waits for the salmon to jump near his face and he actually falls asleep in the water when he’s not eating. His antics make me laugh out loud. I call Otis ‘my main man.’ He’s definitely a favorite.” (Otis has made it the semifinals, and voting is still open if you need to again Meier’s important man.)

Tricia Kubicek, a instructor based mostly close to West Des Moines, Iowa, described watching the rotund bears on the reside cams the identical manner somebody would possibly speak about watching John Candy doing a pratfall.

“The bears are really funny, especially when you watch them stumble down the falls or swim from below the surface,” she stated. “Laughter is truly the best medicine.”

Humans additionally know concerning the trial of an extended, darkish winter, each actual and metaphorical. In the actual world, the times get shorter, the darkness encroaching in your workplace window at 4 p.m. It’s sufficient to want there was a technique to retailer rays of daylight into our subcutaneous tissue. Metaphorically, too, this second can really feel like a harsh winter, significantly with an ongoing pandemic. 

In that regard, the bears at peak plumpness are a reminder of all that’s proper within the halcyon days of summer time. Their waddles, their usually languorous conduct, the way in which their bellies can contact the bottom, the gathering of neighborhood on the Brooks River falls. These are scenes of lots, ones that fats bearophiles wish to maintain onto.

In a Facebook message, Kubicek stated that she got here throughout the fats bears for the primary time after a fellow instructor added a hyperlink to one of many reside cams in a Virtual Calming Room—a useful resource academics at her faculty had arrange for college students to assist them deal with pandemic nervousness with issues like enjoyable music and mindfulness strategies. She grew to become nearly instantly hooked on observing their ursine antics, watching rigorously to see how the bears interacted with one another and learning their personalities from 1000’s of miles away.

“It seemed like everyone was facing tough situations during the pandemic, and this was a way to relax and stay connected to each other,” Kubicek stated. “Our human world is so complex and often polarizing, but the bears are a symbol of interconnectedness.”

Kubicek isn’t the one one to find that watching the bears has offered a much-needed escape from a pandemic that pressured folks to isolate themselves from their very own communities at exactly the second the urge to succeed in out for companionship might need been overwhelming. Kelly Arl, a public faculty instructor from St. Louis, Missouri, stated that after two years of what she described as a “real whirlwind of garbage,” observing the bears—and getting caught up within the pleasure of their on-line followers—has given her one thing to concentrate on outdoors of her covid-19-related stresses and obligations.

“Between schools shutting down entirely, making school happen virtually, handling online and virtual students at the same time, and now making school work with very strict health guidelines, my entire life since March 2020 has been overwhelming, and the burnout is very real,” Arl stated. “I’m starting to feel like I can finally take a breath, and having Fat Bear Week to focus on and get excited about during those breaths is a real joy.”

“This must be what people who care about sports feel like when their team is advancing toward a championship,” she added.

On a given day, discover.org’s reside cams would possibly catch the Katmai bears chowing down on a fish with their cubs, swimming in waist-deep water, or in any other case lumbering together with their newly-acquired pudge, doing bear stuff. On one latest feed, fan-favorite bear Otis, a finalist on this yr’s competitors, was captured stoically fishing as a snowstorm swirled round him.

While the bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve are thriving, their cousins even additional to the north, polar bears, have grow to be the poster youngsters for the deleterious results of local weather change. A quickly warming Arctic and oil and fuel growth are making all of it however not possible for his or her numbers to stabilize. This, too, is a cause folks love Fat Bear Week: It offers some aid from the deluge of Bad Climate News that so usually hounds us, and a possibility to attach with the pure world in a manner that doesn’t contain going through powerful info or preventing off ecological despair.

“I think there’s a lot to love about Fat Bear Week other than adorably pudgy animals,” Jana Arnold, a 28-year-old from Seward, Arkansas, stated. “It’s a celebration of a healthy ecosystem, which is not something that exists for many animals these days. As someone who loves the National Parks Service and is acutely aware of climate change, it means a lot to see a thriving ecosystem and fat happy bears.”

Still, for some, loving massive bears isn’t even about something as lofty as escaping work-induced malaise or preventing off the creep of local weather panic. Sometimes, to see a fats bear in all its glory—steeling itself in opposition to the weather, with a organic certainty that extra darkish days are forward—is to see your self.

“I am Team Grazer because she reminds me of how I see myself,” Kubicek stated. “I am a fierce Momma Bear who is willing to take on opposition from much bigger forces if it means I am able to feed and care for my cubs.”

The winner of Fat Bear Week shall be introduced on October 5 on the National Parks Service’s website. You can try Earther’s definitive rankings for Fat Bear Week 2021 right here.