Bear Force One Takes Flight

A beary feel-good story. On your mark, get set….

Go!

It’s the Fat Bears and, yes, their state of corpulent grace! The highly motivated rotundity of Katmai National Park Alaskan bears allows them to survive six months of hibernation, often losing 1/3 of their body weight.  (Wagering even Weight Watchers would be aghast at this weight loss regimen.)

A human sidebar. I’m trying to imagine everything I could happily consume if my over-loaded holiday plate was crucial to surviving six months of hibernation. No guilt entailed as I reach for my 5th or 6th helping of pumpkin/cherry/apple pie, hiding beneath a layer of whipped cream. This is heaven!  (Um, more whipped cream, please.)

Oh, no, please forgive my digression into human-centric dietary rituals! Our focus is fat bears, not humans. With biologically-driven, porcine-like behavior, these Alaskan bears have 3 months to gain up to 100 pounds(!) a day, feasting on spawning salmon in a nearby river. This annual gorge-athan for winter bear preservation is celebrated each October by the National Park Service as Fat Bear Week. “This year saw more than a million people voting online for their favorite chonky bears.”

You’re just now finding out about this? Where have you been?!

No, no, I can’t forget. Fat Bear Week is supported by public bear cams (cameras), filming 24/7, during the course of the annual salmon gorge-athan. For good or ill, the 24/7 access was the doorway for my plunge into the depths of fat bear-aholism. And, yes, I, Jan, am a bear-aholic, pinned to the bear cams during this nature-driven spectacle. So grateful to be joined in this beary bacchanal by many other online fat bear-aholics.

Let’s be honest, as long as the bears score their daily salmon haul, they could give a damn about out-porcining each other. We, humans, are the ones who become practically rabid, supporting our faves online, in competition for the championship. Vibrant with joy at the increasing portly proportions of our particular favorites, sharing the histories of each bear (and their cubs) to drum up soft-hearted support for our chosen fat bears. Fan clubs form, tending to morph into public voting blocs for particular favorites. All this hoopla leads to the 3-day public voting period when we, humans, are glued to the online tallies for each Fat Bear’s standing in the contest.

Sigh. This is the downside of 24/7 online access - total immersion.

At the contest’s conclusion, there’s a rude awakening in the worldwide community of fat bear-aholics. The public bear cams are turned off. Turned off! The true stars of this saga are now denning in their six-month hibernation period and we, the human element, are in serious withdrawal.

What to do? How to nurture our fat bear addictions when the original sources are taking a long nap? More to the point, how do we turn our perceived powerlessness into (ta-dah!) empowerment?

Ask, and on occasion, you might receive. A very enterprising fat bear-aholic also serves as an elementary school teacher when she’s not glued to the bear cams. Her den, whoops, school, is in a very low-income area. The holidays were nigh and this teacher (den mother?) was concerned that “some of her students were anxious about being away from school for so long. School provides love, consistency and meals for them. A fat bear to squeeze might be a comfort.”

Yep, you’re catching on quickly! This caring, bear-aholic, teacher did her Amazon due diligence and found a stuffed FAT bear for a reasonable price. She put word out to the starved-for-fat-bear-contact human community, asking if denizens might gift bears to her anonymous 26 elementary school students. Bear Force One took flight. (Did it ever!) A veritable feeding frenzy ensued (minus the salmon), as bear-aholics stepped up, clawing their way to gift sender status. Mission accomplished. Twenty-six stuffed fat bears found their way to the teacher’s elementary school and a gentle, if temporary, satisfaction, engulfed this loving community of bear-aholics.

Smile. Told you it would be a beary good story…