Bear Cub Den - Noboribetsu Bear Park, Hokkaido, Japan

Welcome to the cub house at Noboribetsu Bear Park in Hokkaido, Japan, known locally as のぼりべつクマ牧場, where this camera watches the indoor den that the year's young Ezo brown bears sleep in. The view is split between two rooms, one with a shallow water trough the cubs climb in and out of, the other bare concrete and gravel where they tend to pile up together to sleep. Ezo brown bears are the Hokkaido subspecies and the largest land animal in Japan, though at this stage the cubs are still small enough to wrestle each other across the floor.

This is an evening stream rather than a full day. It runs from around 17:00 to 03:00 Japan time, which is nine hours ahead of UTC, so it covers the European and American daytime. The lights go off at about 21:00 and the camera switches to infrared, so the picture turns black and white. The far side of the room can still look lit after that, but that is the infrared lamp rather than anything the bears can see.

The park sits at 550 metres on the summit of Shihorei, on the rim of the Kuttara caldera above Noboribetsu hot spring town, reached by a seven-minute ropeway. It opened in July 1958 with eight bear cubs and was the first place anywhere to successfully keep brown bears together in groups rather than singly. Alongside the enclosures it runs a museum devoted entirely to the brown bear, with skeletons, specimens and material on the animal's place in Hokkaido.

Did You Know? These cubs were born in the middle of a Hokkaido winter, while their mothers were denned up and barely awake. Brown bear cubs arrive blind, nearly hairless and weighing under half a kilogram, roughly the size of a guinea pig, and spend their first weeks nursing in the dark before ever seeing daylight. The ones in this room were all born in January.

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