Five cheetah cubs and the wildlife cameras worth opening in late October
Five cheetah cubs were born at the Smithsonian's Front Royal campus on 2026-10-05, and the den camera on them refreshes every 30 seconds. Today they are 22 days old. Their mother is Zura, five years old and a first-time mother, and the father is Flash, who is nine and takes no part in raising them, as the Smithsonian's own write-up explains. The cubs will not go on public view, so the camera is the only way anyone outside the staff sees them, and the Smithsonian expects them in the den for six or seven months. Zura carries them from one den to another, which is why there is a second camera: an empty frame on one feed usually means a full one on the other.
Wildlife cameras are the one kind where the time of year decides whether there is anything to look at, and late October is a turn in that calendar. Nest boxes are emptying out while the ponds fill up. What follows is what has something in frame today, and what to put in the diary instead.
The Friends of Blackwater run a pan-tilt-zoom camera on a dike between two freshwater impoundment ponds at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, and their page for it says it runs for the autumn and winter migration, October through March. It rotates between vantage points every couple of minutes rather than sitting still, so ten minutes with it open gets you several different views of the same water. The birds they list are tundra swans, Canada and snow geese, and more than twenty species of duck, with mallards, black ducks, teal, wigeon and pintail the ones you are most likely to land on. Eagles, harriers, herons, deer and red foxes cross the same frames.
Our page for that camera read live at 11:24 UTC today on a one-minute refresh. Its best three months start this week, which is not something I often get to say about a camera.
The eagles are back at work and the ospreys have gone
Bald eagle pairs in the Chesapeake build and repair their nests in early winter and lay from January to March, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program. An eagle nest camera in late October is therefore not a dead frame waiting for spring, it is the construction phase, which is the part most viewers skip. Blackwater has two cameras on one nest in a loblolly pine, a fixed one and a PTZ, both pulling a frame a minute.
The osprey platforms on the same refuge are bare sticks at the moment. Ospreys in the Bay head south in mid-August and return in early March, by the same field guide, so the Wildlife Drive platform and the river platform are worth opening for the view rather than the bird. The Friends leave both running because eagles and owls take over the nests once the ospreys have left, which their camera page says outright.
Two kinds of box stay occupied. The screech owl box in Grapevine, Texas is one: Cornell's NestWatch puts a screech owl box 10 to 30 feet up a live tree at the woodland edge, and suggests a second box inside the same pair's territory as a spare in case the first nest fails, in its guidance for the species, so a box is a bedroom as much as a nursery. The other is the peregrine box, and we carry four of them: Harrisburg, Reston, Utica and Manitowoc, all at a frame a minute. Cornell puts a peregrine box on a building, 160 to 250 feet up, among tall city skyscrapers near water, where the birds make effective control for the local pigeons, in the matching page.
Then there are the storks, and they are gone. We hold 22 stork nest cameras counted on 2026-10-27, 21 of them in Slovakia and one in Czechia, this one at Bolesov among them. Central and eastern European storks cross the Balkans and the Bosporus to sub-Saharan Africa, and Nature Park Goricko says the first of them come back in late March, often to the same nest, some of which are decades old and weigh more than 500 kg. Set a reminder for the third week of March and you will catch an arrival.
Coola before the den, and the zoo cameras
The bear yard at Grouse Mountain sits above North Vancouver, and we pull from it every 30 seconds. Coola has lived there since 2001. He is on his own this autumn: Grinder, who arrived as an orphaned cub in the same year, was put down on 2026-07-31 at the age of 25 after a spinal condition paralysed his hind limbs, which the resort announced that day.
The weeks left in the yard this year are few. Last time the pair went into the den on 2024-11-20 and came out on 2025-04-18, which the resort counted as 149 days and watched on an infrared camera inside the den, in its own account of it. On that timetable there are roughly three weeks of visible bear left, and he will be eating for most of them.
Reid Park Zoo publishes eight, counted today: the bears, two on the elephants from different angles, the flamingos, the giraffes, the lemurs, the lions, and a sloth that is doing exactly what you expect. Stills at a frame a minute, all eight live on today's check.
The Smithsonian's remaining six run video at 30 seconds: two on the giant pandas, the lions, Spike the Asian elephant, who the zoo names on its webcam index, and two on the naked mole-rat colony. The mole-rats have no business being as watchable as they are!
What we are doing with them
Every camera above was re-fetched on today's pass, which is where the timestamps come from. The wildlife category holds 12 cameras as of 2026-10-27, which is a thin shelf, and the nature category is much larger but mixes animal cameras in with research cameras pointed at vegetation and peatland. Pulling those two apart is the next job here, because a person who came for an eagle did not come for a flux tower.
The seasonal part is the bit I have not solved. For the Blackwater ponds and the Slovak nests we know the window because the people who run the cameras publish it, and for the rest we are inferring it from the species in the name. I would rather the window sat on the camera page itself, next to the refresh rate, and I cannot see a way to get there that does not involve reading a few hundred operator pages by hand. If you run a wildlife camera and publish your season somewhere machine-readable, tell me where and I will read it.