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Canada Live Cameras — 8 official webcams

Eight cameras from explore.org: orcas in Johnston Strait, polar bears on Hudson Bay, the Churchill aurora, bison in Grasslands National Park. Season decides almost entirely what you get.

What you can see

All eight are explore.org live streams, split across three provinces and three time zones. Unlike any other country on this site, the Canadian cameras are decided almost entirely by when you open them. Get the season wrong and you are looking at empty water or empty snow.

Three in British Columbia, all orcas. OrcaLab on Hanson Island follows the pods circling the island from the research station there; this is the Northern Resident population, watched continuously for over fifty years. Humpbacks, dolphins, Steller sea lions and eagles come into the same frame. The other two are the Robson Bight rubbing beach and its underwater camera, filming the same long-used beach from above and below the surface. Rubbing their bodies on the smooth stones is behaviour unique to this population, and whole families take turns at it.

Three in Manitoba. Two are polar bears at Cape Churchill, in Wapusk National Park — one of the densest maternity denning areas in the world. Bears gather on the shore waiting for the bay to freeze, because the ice is the platform they hunt seals from. The third, the Churchill aurora camera, points at the sky from the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, directly beneath the auroral oval and on one of the best pieces of ground anywhere for seeing it.

Two in Saskatchewan, both plains bison in Grasslands National Park. One watches a natural spring in the West Block, where bison come to drink and sometimes stand in the water on hot days. The other looks out over a remote stretch of the same block, where mule deer, pronghorn and grassland songbirds also pass.

The provider does not permit reproduction of its images, so this site carries no sample image for any of these eight.

8 cameras in Canada

All 8 are live video. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

When to watch

Each province is a different offset. Vancouver runs sixteen hours behind Japan (seventeen in winter), Churchill fifteen (fourteen on daylight saving), and Saskatchewan does not use daylight saving at all, so it stays fifteen hours behind all year.

The three orca cameras are a summer proposition. The provider recommends July to September for the two rubbing-beach cameras, and the OrcaLab base is monitored most closely through the summer. Local afternoon is the small hours in Japan, so around 05:00 Japan time is the window.

The polar bears are October and November only. That is the stretch when bears collect on the shore waiting for the freeze; open the camera in any other month and the cape is empty. Those two months are the provider's own guidance.

The aurora camera is one of the few on this site that runs during Japanese waking hours. It streams from 17:00 to 08:00 local, and the provider says February and March are the best of it. In February and March that works out to roughly 08:00 to 23:00 Japan time — a night camera you can watch in the middle of your day, which is a rare combination.

The two bison cameras carry no seasonal guidance. In winter you see bison shouldering snow aside to reach grass; in spring, herds with calves. They stream 04:00 to 23:00 local, which is 19:00 to 14:00 the following day in Japan. Only the Japanese early afternoon falls in the gap.

Closer looks at cameras here

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 filter or re-sort, go to the camera list. You can narrow all 439 cameras by format, region, subject and provider.