iโm just curious, and there is absolutely no judgment in this question - how long do you spend each day watching the bears? is it all live or do you watch recaps and stuff? and how have you gotten so good at telling them apart? the only one i can ID for sure is 32 Chunk lmaooo. love your blog and katmai!
to begin, i am multiply disabled and unable to work because of that. When i am flaring, i watch the bears more because it is a simple thing for me to do. when i am doing better, i watch them less because i spend my time doing other things. Everything i post about is live unless stated otherwise, though i do also watch recaps sometimes. I check LunaCre's morning recap gifs like its the friggin newspaper!
I primarily watch the bear cams alongside other activities, like knitting, watching youtube, taking transit, doing chores, stuff like that. It probably looks like i am watching all the time, but in reality i miss a lot of stuff -- i check in frequently, but i don't usually stick around if nothing particularly interesting is happening.
as for IDs, a lot of it is time and the rest is effort. Most of the IDs here come at least partially from the explore chat, not just from me. There are very few bears i can basically always ID, and they usually have a fairly unique feature for me to grab on to -- the ones that come to mind are 151 Walker, 89 Backpack, 32 Chunk, 801, 164 Bucky Dent, and 609. Bears where my hit rate is about 80-90% include 903 Gully, 128 Grazer, 99, 910, 610, and 503 Cubadult. There are more where i can reliably ID them in certain contexts, usually based on specific behaviours or fishing locations, but am basically hopeless outside of those specific contexts.
Most of my ID skill is really just "i watch these cams a lot and pay attention to the explore chat, and also running this blog for the last few years has helped". At some point I just started seeing the differences in their faces, coats, and builds. Looking at family trees can help, too -- its often easier to say "this looks like someone in the Amelia family" or "this looks like one of the Beadnose girls" and then narrow down who it is based on size/behaviour than it is to try and pull a number out from nothing.
anyways, that's a lot of words to basically say: i dont do all the IDs on this blog by myself, and the ones i can ID on my own are mostly like that because i just spend a lot of time matching bears to numbers for my posts.
