Tundra Buggies® >>

Unlike WildCam Grizzlies or WildCam Africa, Polar Bear Cam isn't a video feed from a remotely controlled stationary camera. Polar bears—being nomadic—could never be pinned down to a fixed location like Pete's Pond. They have to be stalked by the camera, so to speak. This is where wildlife cinematographer Daniel Zatz comes in. As owner of SeeMore Wildlife Systems, Inc., Zatz specializes in imaging systems for remote locations and is committed to the concept of treading lightly in the environments he films. After working with National Geographic Magazine Online on its previous WebCams, this project posed its own unique challenges for the four-time Emmy winner. First, he and his staff at SeeMore designed a camera that he would be able to maneuver from within the confines of a Tundra Buggy®. His team then built a system of digital microwave links to transmit the images across the tundra and back to Churchill, a town that is connected to the Internet via commercial cable. Here's how it works.

Digital Highway Across the Tundra

To facilitate the kind of interactive research and video processing that Polar Bear Cam exemplifies, Tundra Buggy® One—the oldest in the vehicle fleet—was recently revamped. In it Zatz and a host of polar bear researchers are departing from the mobile lodge at Gordon Point every morning—later in the season, the lodge will be at Cape Churchill—to locate polar bears across the tundra. For the six hours of subarctic sunlight available each day, Zatz himself will be the primary cameraman. Remotely controlled from within the buggy, the WebCam on the outside of the chassis will capture images using a 360° pan, a powerful zoom, and a highly maneuverable jib arm for pointing it in all directions, including downward on the body of the buggy itself—which curious bears often attempt to scale. Atop the buggy, an omni-directional microwave antenna transmits the video signal to the top of the highest structure in the region: a 40-foot (12 meters) observation tower on Cape Churchill. From there the signal is retransmitted to another tower located on the old Churchill rocket range, 27 miles (43 kilometers) to the west, and on to the tallest structure in the town of Churchill, an old grain elevator. From there a final microwave link retransmits the signal to the L & C Cable television building in Churchill, where it is relayed by cable to Winnipeg and then to RealNetworks in Seattle. Finally, the live streaming video is published to the Internet through National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., where viewers access it online in real time.

Many of the innovations employed on Polar Bear Cam are cutting edge. Using new German technology, the SeeMore team powered the primary transmitter atop the Cape Churchill tower with solar panels and a methanol fuel cell, which Zatz describes as "very small and very efficient, able to operate at low temperatures virtually without maintenance." The small digital highway across the tundra that the crew built for this project is all microwave, a point-to-point terrestrial-linked system that Zatz finds far more cost-effective than satellite transmission. "In the past you'd put a satellite dish out there," he says. "While that worked, you had to repeatedly pay a huge amount of money for the bandwidth, year after year. With this system, your costs drop dramatically after the initial outlay." Additionally, the digital link allows SeeMore Wildlife to simultaneously deliver television-quality video from the WebCam to residents of the town of Churchill. To top it off, Zatz says his team has done its best to "future-proof the entire system" by making it HD-ready—that is, ready to transmit video images in the high-definition format that is set to become the new broadcast standard.