Nature Observatory

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Wildlife: 85 Live Cameras

Brown bears, cranes, polar bears, elephants. Wildlife cameras show nothing at all if you get the season or the hour wrong — and fill the entire frame if you get it right.

Sample frame from Kushimoto Marine Park (August 2026)
Kushimoto Marine Park · Sample August 2026

What you can see

This is the one category where timing changes the result completely. Out of season, a migratory bird camera shows an empty paddy field or a sheet of ice. In season, the same camera shows thousands of birds. The cameras here are the ones with the widest gap between those two states.

Ten of the cameras are in Japan; the rest are abroad — thirty-nine in the United States, eight in South Africa, seven in Canada, six in Kenya, and so on. Seventy-three of the eighty-five are live video, which makes this the only category on the site with more video than stills. Brown bears waiting for salmon at Brooks Falls in Alaska, the crossings on Kenya's Mara River, South African waterholes, the bonobo forest in Congo. They sit where animals reliably come back to: feeding stations, waterholes, river crossings.

Most of the Japanese cameras were installed by the Environment Ministry or local governments at Ramsar Convention wetlands — waterbird habitats a treaty commits its signatories to protecting. People approaching would flush the birds, so the cameras watch from a distance on long lenses.

Not everything here has feathers. One camera covers the Tsushima leopard cat, found nowhere else in the world, in a captive enclosure; another sits underwater and simply shows fish. Zoo and aquarium cameras follow a keeping schedule, so outside opening hours the feed stops.

Cameras you can watch now: 85

73 video, 12 still. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

Hokkaido2

Aomori1

Miyagi1

Fukui1

Shiga1

Wakayama1

Tottori1

Fukuoka1

Kagoshima1

United States39

Taiwan1

South Africa8

Canada7

Kenya6

Costa Rica3

DR Congo3

Botswana2

Panama2

Honduras2

Elsewhere2

When to watch

Cranes and swans: October to March. Outside that window you will see essentially nothing. Over ten thousand hooded and white-naped cranes winter on the Izumi plain in Kagoshima, peaking through December and January. Swans in northern Japan run to the same calendar, gathering before the lakes freeze and again after they open.

Red-crowned cranes are the exception — they are there all year. The Kushiro population does not migrate, so summer works too. But the famous image of them dancing on snow only happens at the winter feeding grounds, on January and February mornings.

For time of day, early morning and late afternoon. Birds leave the roost at first light and return before dark, and those two windows hold both the largest numbers and the most movement. Through the middle of the day they scatter to feed and only a few stay in frame.

Abroad, watch both the season and the clock. The Alaskan brown bears run from late June through July, when the sockeye climb; the black bears of Anan Creek in July and August; the Carlsbad bats in August and September. Every window written on a card is one the provider itself states. African waterholes run six to seven hours behind Japan, so the Japanese evening and night is the local afternoon.

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Agencies publishing the cameras on this page

The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.

To find other cameras, go to the camera list. You can narrow the cameras by format, region, subject and provider.