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LIVE CAMS CAN

  • Writer: Libby K. Hanaway
    Libby K. Hanaway
  • 22 hours ago
  • 10 min read

Hello and Happy March! I'm glad you tuned in because today (and next time) we are talking about the technological wonders of live cams. This topic excludes military-grade AI surveillance capabilities or the dog-and-more-finding Ring cameras from that backfired Super Bowl commercial or road conditions on the interstate or the kind of streetlight cameras that might have led to Rick getting his first speeding ticket in 30 years last month (in the two pics featured in the mailed citation, you can hazily see C in the front passenger seat holding something white. In his defense, Rick says he was just trying to get home quickly so the Krazy Karl's pizza — in a white pizza box on C's lap — would still be nice and hot. Please don't raise our rates, State Farm.)


So yes, we're going to steer clear of human privacy violations and will instead be turning our eyes and ears to the real-time enchantment of otters, puppies, sea kelp (Part 2), a National Park (Part 2), and more. Here's what these kinds of nature-centric live cams CAN DO FOR YOU:

  • transport you

  • delight you

  • inform you

  • calm you

  • entertain you

  • wow you

  • educate you

  • transfix you


Normally, I'd advocate for getting out in the world to experience these wonders for ourselves, but most of us are limited by time, budgets, and oxygen requirements (Part 2). Live cam feeds give us a chance to go on immersive digital field trips to places far, far away ... and then be back in time to send three more emails.



My own road to live cams started with the big, gaping black rectangle of our TV. It seemed like a wasted opportunity, something the makers of The Frame TV — with its rotating gallery of artwork filling the screen — set out to solve. A Frame TV is on my no-time-soon wish list, so for now I've been using the lower-budget next-best thing: the pre-loaded "ambient" nature scenes on our Samsung TV. These are my current favorites, with the middle one as my default. So much better than a dark, empty box, right?



A RELATED CAUTION NOTE ABOUT CREATING AMBIENCE NEAR A TV: Just before Rick and I sat down to watch an episode from the new season of The Lincoln Lawyer last week (who else thinks Lorna needs her own spin-off 🙋‍♀️?), I lit a candle on the cabinet below. As we watched Mickey Haller defend himself from life in prison, Rick pointed to the bottom-right corner of the screen and said, "Hey, is that candle burning the TV?" Great catch! We now have a warped black edge along the bottom of the TV and a newly burnished Samsung Eternal Flame that is permanently visible, more or less, depending on the current color of the screen. You might wonder if this was a sneaky ploy for a Frame TV; scout's honor, no. I think the Samsung Eternal Flame will be with us for a long time.



A couple of years ago, I realized I could do the beautiful static images one better: live streams! I first tried a beach scene, but the only ones available had a doorbell camera's curved-lens view and/or showed tiny beachgoers dotting the sand with tiny chairs and towels ... and that felt voyeuristic instead of serene.


I scrolled through other options with the remote, landing on a live feed of an African plain, where actual animals of the savanna were sauntering right that very same actual minute toward a watering hole at the center of the screen. 🤩 🙌 🤩! Just as I was wondering why we didn't have a video safari airing in our family room all the time — the elephants! the giraffes! — a large cat at the water's edge started eating a smaller creature right in front of my eyes. Well, yes, that's nature ... but that was the end of that.


I set this experiment aside and returned to my peaceful rocky-sea TV still life. But then soon after, I wrote my first post on this site — the one about manatees — and stumbled upon the wonder of manatee live cams. And thankfully, the scenes were reliably violence-free. While threats like boat prop strikes and red tides are absolutely dangerous for manatees, I had no concerns about unexpected survival-of-the-fittest scenes; on the live cams, manatees are usually cocooned in warm, protective springs and they themselves are the gentlest creatures to grace our globe. So from desert-dry Colorado, I could confidently and happily keep up with my slow-floating manatee friends in the still, sunny waters of Florida. They were just my pace!


Though I'd be happy to stick with my plump, tranquil, algae-fuzzied manatees from here on out, I thought I'd do a little exploration to find additional good-vibes live cams. My first source for material was E, a teacher who knows better than to put a live-action savanna watering hole scene up in front of second-graders. For special classroom occasions, she wisely turned to well-reviewed highlights of previously-live feeds that had been maximized for dazzle and edited for any content that would send her classroom spinning. [Most of the live feeds below have highlight reels if you search around. Live cam highlights are a great browsing option with guaranteed bang for your buck, but in this post I'm after less-predictable though possibly more exciting parallel-time amazement.] In addition to consulting E, I also looked at teacher threads on Reddit and ran a few Google searches with the following standard in mind: if a live cam feed is good for your average 8-year-old, it will be good for Here's One Good Thing, too.


Below and next week, we'll have a dozen+ interesting, enjoyable, escapist, and reliably peaceful live webcam feeds clumped into a few categories: animals this week and underwater life and compelling places next week. To set some realistic expectations:


  • These feeds do not have the crisp beauty of a nature documentary or the vividness of the slick, thick pages of National Geographic. Rain may splatter the camera lens. Employees may walk across the camera view. (In one feed from below, I watched a person scroll through their phone in the corner of the screen.) And there is no soothing David Attenborough narration to carry us through the scene; you'll probably hear wind, background clattering, or New Age music instead. Keep your expectations on par with the blurry, unpolished home videos of the late 1990s, and you should be satisfied.


  • Sometimes these feeds show nothing at all. I kept searching for underwater cameras in the late afternoon Mountain Time, slow to realize the East Coast waters would be dark by then. The natural cycles of time and daylight factor strongly here, so plan your viewing accordingly. Also, some of the feeds have limited hours, like 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in time zones that might not match yours.


  • Thrilling action may be elusive — patience is required. Sometimes the subject at hand is just simply floating / sitting / sleeping / staring / squabbling / existing, which is its natural right. Really, that's what most humans do anyway. If a giraffe were watching me during the day, it would probably wander off to find some fresh leaves within the first 45 seconds.


These limitations aside, there's something astonishing about getting a real-time glimpse of life in a different realm. I hope you find one or two live views to enjoy, too!



ANIMALS

OTTERS 🦦! Otters, with their frisky, acrobatic aquatic charm, are usually the stars of any show above or below water. They've always been a favorite animal in our family and maybe yours, too. Following a Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce boost that began last year, their popularity surged worldwide (Kelce is now known as "Uncle Trav" to the three river otters he recently "adopted" through the Philadelphia Zoo). To capitalize on the sudden otter attention, the Monterey Bay Aquarium smartly re-released a vintage t-shirt design from 1993 as a fundraiser, raising over $2.3 million for their Sea Otter Program and other ocean conservation efforts. E wears hers with utter otter pride!



🦦



BALD EAGLES 🦅! We are going from sea to sky with a perched peek of nesting bald eagles. These majestic raptors start out like every other tiny, vulnerable babe with watchful parents swooping in with protection and food. Here are three California eagle live cams to observe the family life of our national bird (the third camera below rotates for beautiful bonus views of Catalina Harbor and the craggy California coastline):


🪺



BACKYARD BIRDS 🐦! Now let's find some birds closer to ground. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University — home of the ever-helpful Merlin Bird ID app (used by me, QB Sam Darnold as mentioned in our Seahawks post, and millions more) — is a fantastic resource for backyard-and-beyond birdwatchers. In addition to providing ace bird identification through its app, the lab hosts a live cam with multiple feeders in what looks like a very, very spacious, edge-of-forest backyard. It's fun to watch the birds flit in and out, with no responsibilities for refilling the feeders.

Per site: "This FeederWatch cam is located in the Treman Bird Feeding Garden at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Perched on the edge of both Sapsucker Woods and its 10-acre pond, these feeders attract both forest species like chickadees and woodpeckers as well as some species that prefer open environments near water like Red-winged Blackbirds."


CLICK HERE ➡️: CORNELL LAB FEEDERWATCH CAM 

🐦‍⬛



PUPPIES 🐶! If we had a live cam of our sweet old Goldie back in her day, I think we would have been very, very distracted and nonproductive, taking sneak peeks of her whenever we were away from home. Even watching her sleep, with her red-gold belly rising and falling in rhythm, was a calming comfort.



For an actual live view of (more) energetic young pups, below is a live feed of puppies courtesy of the Warrior Canine Connection, an outstanding organization that "enlists recovering Warriors in a therapeutic mission of learning to train service dogs for their fellow Veterans" (per site). The training itself is a form of Mission-Based Trauma Recovery, providing a recovery path for PTSD, combat stress, and more. Once fully-grown and fully-trained by recovering veterans, the dogs, in turn, become service animals for wounded veterans. It's an amazing circle for trust, healing, and independent living.


🦮



KITTENS 🐱! Of course, we must give equal time to the felines, especially now that we have a feline grandkitten in the family. Sweet Pea's mom, C, is definitely keeping tabs 👀. All credit to the Pea + C, who together helped convince me that cats can grab your heart just like their canine cousins do.



And I've got to say, it's very charming to see a kitten frolic and leap and pounce as it explores its space. Here's a live feed of the Kitten Rescue Sanctuary in Los Angeles, CA. The website explains the purpose of this playroom:

"[The room] is dedicated to nursing moms with litters of kittens. When we don’t happen to have a mom with a litter, we use this area as a romper room for some of our kittens waiting to be adopted. All of the young stars you see on this live feed will be looking for homes, including Mom! If you fall in love, don’t hesitate — get an adoption application form in to us, pronto!


I just popped over to the live cam and two kittens were sleeping on top of each other. The scene instantly gave calming Goldie vibes! If you live near LA and are considering life with a cat, check out this rescue in person!


🐈‍⬛



GIRAFFES 🦒! Giraffes are marvelously magnificent — practically mythical! — creatures. I put them in the same wondrous category as manatees, just with a very different body type and no in-the-wild North American accessibility. In the USA, you are off to a zoo or conservation area to catch a real-life view of their gentle, leaf-eating lifestyle. Some zoos have a deservedly 😬 reputation these days, but there are many respected, conservation-oriented institutions worth visiting.


A spectacular place to visit giraffes is the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, CA, a top-tier zoo and conservation facility. For two years in a row, we briefly dried out from our Seattle winters in Palm Springs / Palm Desert, both times feeding giraffes early on New Year's Day morning. There is nothing like feeding a fistful of lettuce to giraffes as an incentive to greet the new year bright and early with good hope. It was 1000% delightful.



You, too, can watch the giraffes roam the desert via the Living Desert's live cam. The zoo has two live cameras on the page below: the first is a bobcat cam, and the giraffes are on the African Savanna Live Web Cam in the second view (in black and white in non-daylight hours, fyi — wait for the sunshine). Enjoy!


🦒


Come back next week for Live Cams Can / Part 2, when we'll travel in real time under the sea, into outer space, and to several other amazing places above and below Earth's surface. Thanks for tuning in!




EXTRA GOOD

ALSO LINKED THROUGH THE EXTRA GOOD PAGE HERE

TUESDAY, MARCH 3, 2026


1._GOOD MUSIC: There are many ways to discover new music: on the radio, on Spotify, at the grocery store pushing your cart (I have Shazamed many a song while shopping). Occasionally, I'll be mid-workout on Peloton and stop to take a pic of the song that's playing. That's exactly how I discovered House Gospel Choir, a singing group that blends house music and gospel music in one joyous fusion. I was SMILING alone in the middle of my basement barre class, which is a real feat. I also discovered I was in good Peloton company: in the comments for a House Gospel Choir music video four years ago, someone posted "Anyone here because of Peloton".



I learned that the London-based House Gospel Choir is a whole big thing, spreading love and good vibes since debuting at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 2014. You do not need to love gospel music or be a church-goer to become a fan. I think the sound is pretty irresistible to anyone who can tap their toes. You can discover more of their music via the House Gospel Choir Instagram page; for now, please join me in grooving in your chair to "Most Precious Love." We will carry February's love vibes right along with us into wet, muddy March 💦☘️💦.




SEE YOU HERE NEXT TIME FOR
ANOTHER BATCH OF GOOD

😀 


 
 
 

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