Lifestyles of the fat and famous

[brooklynite]

Washington Post

KATMAI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, Alaska — You won’t be able to hear a bear walking behind you here. Despite weighing around 1,000 pounds, the park’s 2,200 brown bears are inordinately quiet. But you will register their roars from deep in the woods. And the snapping of salmon spines when an apex predator cracks open a cold one.

Those sounds are particularly loud in a “bear vortex,” which is how wildlife guide and photographer Jon Kuiper describes being surrounded by four bears. A “bear-nado” means you’re at the center of six bears. Eight bears is a “bear-nami,” and “double digits is just like, ‘bear-icane,’” said Kuiper, 35, who’s earned the nickname “Bear Daddy.” He has a large tattoo of his favorite bear, 32 “Chunk,” on his right triceps.

Kuiper works at Brooks Lodge at Brooks Camp, arguably the best place in the world to see swarms of bears up close.

Brooks has garnered international fame thanks to webcams that been live-streaming from the park since 2012, as well as Fat Bear Week, an online tournament celebrating the bears as they bulk up for hibernation. More than a million votes were cast in Fat Bear Week ’22, and 10 million people tuned in to the cameras last June through October.

[shrike3]

1. Been to Katmai. The bears indeed are very quiet. Unnerving.

[Hekate]

2. I've never forgotten that guy who was so convinced the bears were his buddies ...

… that he talked his unwilling girlfriend into camping out with the big furry guys.

They got eaten.