Excerpts from The Believer: The Magic Well: Confronting Death Through the Eye of the Animal Cam

“We watch not because of the animals’ beauty alone, or because of what we learn from watching, but because the webcam—like a memento mori—trains our attention on the now.”

DISCUSSED:

Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute; Front Royal, Virginia; Cheetah Cub Cam; Netscape; World Wide Web; Mangolinkcam.com; Memento Mori; Banquet Ghosts; Stoics; Karl von Frisch; Tschocki the Parrot; Unselfing; Comparative Thanatology; Jackie and Shadow; Waggle Dances; Existential Dread; the Duality of Life and Death; Telepresence; Impressions of Proximity; Mirror Neurons; Murdoch’s Kestrel; Spelunker’s Frozen Custard & Cavern Burgers

The first image came in black and white: slashes of sable, rosettes, slender legs. Echo’s eyes were zipped shut, her face marked with lines as if dripping with tears. Several babies curled up at her belly on the floor of a straw-lined den. I was close enough to their pile of spots that their purrs were audible: their bodies inflated with air and hummed as they exhaled, together forming a symphony of breath. For a brief moment, Echo startled—then they all shifted, jolted awake, tilting their faces toward her with barely opened eyes. Paws pressed against heads as one stretched into a belly-up position, a single leg in the air, its body sandwiched between those of its siblings.

At home, I sat in a dark room nearly three thousand miles away. Outside my window, rain clattered on the deck. I touched the screen of my laptop and counted their heads with my finger: one, two, three, four, five—and Echo—each with a set of paws, a head, tail, eyes, ears. They were being streamed across the Cheetah Cub Cam, operated by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal, Virginia. That first evening, I watched for forty-five minutes as they cycled through this pattern of sleep and readjustment. Echo rolled backward, creating a cradle with her body; two cubs lay inside. A pair in the corner embraced. The next day I tuned in and it was more of the same: sleep, stir, wake, rest. By the end of the week, I was running the live stream on a separate monitor on my desk, turning toward it when a shuffle of straw indicated movement, or when I paused for a break from whatever task I was working on. I stopped, then looked.

Echo, an eight-year-old cheetah from White Oak Conservation in Florida, gave birth at SCBI in September of 2023 to three male and two female cubs. A few days later, the six were broadcast through SCBI’s platform: black-and-white night cams transformed into color at dawn, capturing them as they moved between two dens constructed in the maternity yard where they lived, each rigged with its own cam. These moments were joy-filled and felt oddly mesmerizing, despite the divide between us. I attuned my attention to their movements, and they absorbed me in what felt like an act of magic. Without registering the time, I watched for hours, and while I did, I thought of nothing else.

II.

In 1994, one of the first animal webcams was installed in a forty-gallon aquarium at the Netscape offices in Mountain View, California. Every three to four seconds, it broadcast images of fish to the World Wide Web, a novelty that sparked curiosity and delight. At its peak, one hundred thousand unique visits were made to the FishCam each day. Now an estimated sixteen thousand webcams—streaming from parks, zoos, museums, aquariums, and conservation centers all over the world—provide viewers with live footage of animals. There are so many streams available; reference websites like mangolinkcam.com aggregate these webcams by animal type, directly linking viewers to host sites where they can find exactly what they’re looking for. Click on “Aquatic,” and links to the California Academy of Sciences, the Aquarium of the Pacific, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA) appear. Once you’re on MBA’s live cam site, choose from several subcategories: “Aviary,” “Kelp Forest,” “Monterey Bay,” “Open Sea,” “Penguin,” “Moon Jelly,” “Shark,” and “Spider Crab.” Visit the “Sea Otter Cam” to view their feeding, handling, and examinations; visit the “Jelly Cam” to observe sea nettles, their umbrella-like bodies pulsing inside the screen’s frame before slowly drifting out of view.

Online, in a honeybee hive in Buchloe, Germany, a collective thrums and vibrates. An osprey nest webcam in Charlo, Montana, operated by the Owl Research Institute, focuses on a pair of birds delivering a series of sticks to their nest. The Cape East camera, run by Polar Bears International in Wapusk National Park, pans horizontally across the frozen tundra as it searches for activity on the horizon, spots of brown earth emerging where snow has melted. Sandhill cranes in Gibbon, Nebraska; a puffin burrow on Machias Seal Island; a pair of koalas at the San Diego Zoo. The streams are two-dimensional, plotless, unedited. It became clear in my early days of watching that the magnetic pull I experienced couldn’t be attributed to joy alone. The webcams are educational; they steward connections with nature and provide entertainment, and it’s possible these aspects contribute to a sense of elation in viewing. But the cheetahs’ lives—like those of the other animals—were in most every respect very, very mundane. In the time I spent watching them, they mostly just slept. Despite the monotony, I quietly observed them, sitting on the couch in the evening with the stream playing on my phone as I folded laundry. In looking, I was taken away. Transported. Or at least I thought I was.

The concept of memento mori, translated from Latin as “remember that you must die,” traces as far back as ancient Egypt, and has appeared in different forms. In Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, Joanna Ebenstein writes about how skeletons were displayed during feasts, and bronze “banquet ghosts” were passed out as favors to prompt partygoers to savor time. Stoics kept small tokens of death, such as skulls, on their desks, and vanitas oil paintings were filled with time-related symbols that aimed to depict the fleeting nature of life. Smaller memento mori—many of which employed decaying animals such as butterflies, ravens, and snakes as symbols for the death-and-life cycle—were often held close to the body to encourage people to live now, die later, and served as visual cues suggesting that an end comes for us all. The purpose of these tokens was as a kind of aversion therapy and an exercise in placing oneself in the present: meditate on the chosen piece as a reminder of death, and one’s fear of the end will dissipate.

Stoics believed this helped one live more fully—that to put death at the center of each waking moment was in fact to be alive. But what if that token were animated instead of static—living and swimming, playing and purring in the space captured by a webcam stream? These technologies can facilitate an appreciation of the natural world, and awe at the diversity of life forms on earth: animals are breathtaking, but they are also alive in the present moment, and immediately accessible, thanks to the camera’s ability to bridge the distance between us and them. But perhaps more subtly, the webcams also illuminate and sharpen the reality of our own tenuous existence in the material world. We watch not because of the animals’ beauty alone, or because of what we learn from watching, but because the webcam—like a memento mori—trains our attention on the now.

Read the rest over at The Believer.