View Animals in the Wild through the Zoo's New Global Camera-Traps

The Smithsonian National Zoo has unveiled a new website that will display more than 200,000 "camera trap" photos taken from all over the world. Camera traps are motion-activated, and the photos you see are exactly as seen by the scientists when retrieved from the camera in its location out in the wild.  Sometimes you may even see poachers.

The camera trap website displays both still photos and video clips of more than 200 species of mammals and birds, and provides links through social media such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook to allow the public to share and comment on the photos. The site also provides reference links from each photo to corresponding species pages at the Encyclopedia of Life, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History's own North American Mammals page.

The site is part of the Smithsonian's Web 2.0 initiative to make Smithsonian science and resources more accessible to the public.