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Thursday 23 April 2009

World Premiere: Bearcam Featuring the Brown Bear


Finnish online service BearCam allows you to admire Europe’s greatest carnivores, the brown bears (Ursus arctos) as they awaken from winter hibernation. Starting May 1st live videos will present the wild bears from the taiga forest in Eastern Finland, near the Russian border.

The BearCam is installed in the animal observation site of the Wild Brown Bear Company, which arranges animal watching tours. In tests last summer, the webcam system which films live feeds showed a very high probability of capturing the bears on film. Although brown bears are classed as near threatened in for example many European countries, the taiga forests of Eastern Finland are home to a large number of them.

“Bears are shy, mostly nocturnal animals and are rarely seen without hidden observation huts and the use of carcasses. However, one can see bears approximately 95 per cent of the nights between late April and August,” explains Jaana Keränen, the sales manager of Wild Taiga, a network of the region’s tourism operators.

BearCam feeds live videos in the hours between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., the time when bears are most active. Daytime visitors of the website can browse the video archive.

From April, the first to wake up from their winter’s sleep are the large males, followed later in June by the mother bears and their cubs. Obtaining good quality video material is easy during the period of the Midnight Sun when the sun doesn’t set. For darker nights in the autumn, the video camera is equipped with infrared light.

The evergreen taiga forest provides possibilities for guided wildlife observing and photographing trips. In these excursions, one can admire different rare and endangered wild mammals, in particular bears, wolves and wolverines.

Starting May 1st the BearCam can be found on the Wild Brown Bear website at www.wbb.fi

Information about operators offering wildlife observation tours can be found at Wild Taiga website www.wildtaiga.fi

For more information about visiting Finland:

For more information on Finland visit www.visitfinland/com.au

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