Very Pregnant Brown Bear Goes Fishing In Alaska: Watch Live

KING SALMON, AK — This is squeal worthy: When we caught up with her, a very pregnant-looking brown bear in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve hopped into the water below Brooks Falls, leaving three cubs on a mossy rock as she fished for salmon swimming up the Brooks River to spawn. The younger ones soon joined her in the frothy pool, then scattered as another bear — a bigger, badder bear? — entered the water and snapped up a fish.

Later, a new bear family entered the Brooks Falls area. The cubs waited in the grass while Mom fished, tumbled around with each other and played tug-of-war with something they had dug out of the ground that looked like a knapsack brought along for the leftovers. Foraging for food is typical bear behavior — their waking hours are dominated for the search for nutrition to sustain their heft, and the park near King Salmon, Alaska, has an abundant source of protein-rich food.

We won't tell the boss if you won't that you’re losing time watching the raw, unscripted drama on Explore.org’s live webcam at Katmai, which provides some of the few remaining unaltered habitats for brown bears and is billed as the best place in the world to watch the species in the wild.

(Also, shush, there are dozens of livecams on Explore.org — among them livestreams that feature Panda bears in China, African wildlife in Kenya and deep sea species in Mexico.)

But the brown bears are neat, especially at this time of the year as they pack on pounds for the winter. They’re opportunistic, and sometimes simply wait for the salmon to leap and catch the fish in their mouths. They snorkel, diving under water to catch their prey. Some bears are pirates, stealing another bear’s catch, though dominant bears will valiantly defend their fishing spots. And, rarely, they beg from other bears, which do not share food, but the reward for all their bawling is, alas, typically only scraps — gill plates, mandibles, entrails and such.

Be sure to watch soon, though. Brown bears enter their dens for hibernation by late October or November, and pregnant bears and females with cubs will retreat sooner. Adult males are usually the last to enter the dens, and can be active well into December.

Katmai National Park and Preserve is located on Alaska’s peninsula, where the 2,200 bears far outnumber people — though people have made their homes in the area for at least 9,000 years and continue to do so.

You can watch the Katmai brown bears here.

File photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images News/Getty Images