Local wildlife remains busy, throughout the winter.
I’ve been pleased by the overwhelming response to my “Best of 2024” summary video, which seems to have brought enjoyment to many an armchair wildlife fan. Thanks for sharing your feedback! I enjoy sharing the videos from my wildlife camera, and I enjoy even more the opportunity to spend time in the outdoors, off trail, wandering through a local forest with an eye and ear tuned to the signs and sounds of nature. Read on to see January’s new videos!
Favorite photos and videos.
Wow, 2024 was quite the year. With a dozen or more hikes in New Hampshire, and travels to Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, California, South Carolina, and India, I had many opportunities for photography. Check out some of my favorite photos!
This year I dug deeper into wildlife photography by expanding my network of camera traps (wildlife cameras) in a forest near home. Click on the image below for a compendium of my favorite clips! It is 14 minutes long – I know, in the era of TikTok that may seem interminable, but I encourage you to sit back and enjoy the wildlife at its own pace. You’ll see black bear, beaver, bobcat, coyote, deer, fisher, red fox, goose, groundhog, owl, raccoon, skunk, flying squirrel, and turkey.
For all my wildlife-camera videos, visit this tag.
P.S. PetaPixel posted its own “best trail camera photos of 2024”. Exotic!
Still cameras: this year I upgraded from the Canon R5 to the Canon R5 Mark II; I use several lenses for most photos: 24-105mm, 100-500mm, and (recently) 200-800mm. Some of my favorites also come from my iPhone 14 Pro.
Wildlife cameras: I started off with a pair of cameras from Punvoe, which produced most of the video on this site; more recently I’ve bought some Rigdoo; they are very similar (the internal firmware is clearly almost identical) but with a better camera (4K) and (supposedly) a faster reaction time and less-obtrusive night-vision light.
Bobcats, beavers, coyotes, and more!
The month of December brought snow… then melt… then snow… then melt. The wildlife in my little area of Lyme’s forest were busy… the deer were seeking food among the remnants of summer’s bounty, the squirrels were looking for long-lost acorns, the beavers were rebuilding one section of their dam only to find other sections breached in late-December rains. The foxes, coyotes, and bobcats were on the prowl, hoping to capture one of the above. Check out this month’s video for more! Sit back and relax for just six minutes.
A somewhat-annual tradition.
I’ve been hiking to the summit of Mount Moosilauke on (or about) New Year’s Day since at least 1984… and, for many of those years, camping in one of the rustic cabins on the side of the mountain: John Rand cabin on the east side, or Great Bear cabin on the southwest side. To retreat for two or three nights to a remote cabin, totally off the grid, where it may be 10ºF (or even –10ºF) outside while it is warm and snug (60º or 70ºF) inside, surrounded by friends. We spend hours cooking delicious meals, telling old stories, and playing board games while the snow falls outside. Read on…
Christmas on Kiawah Island – and wildlife photography.
We spend nearly every Christmas on Kiawah Island, South Carolina. One of the “sea islands” that form a chain of barrier islands near Charleston, Kiawah is heavily developed with vacation homes and golf courses… but is also carefully managed for green spaces and wildlife. As a result, it is a beautiful place to explore and to photograph wildlife. I enjoyed the perching birds (hawk, osprey, herons) and the shorebirds. But… read on!
Continue reading “Kiawah Island, SC”Final installment of clips from my wildlife cameras in November.
I recently doubled the number of cameras I have posted in strategic locations in a nearby forest of Lyme, New Hampshire. Last week I shared my first video of beavers, busy collecting trees and repairing their dams; then some video of other visitors to that same brook. Today I return to my traditional stomping grounds, where we get to see who was roaming that hill… the steep/rocky east side, the flat hilltop, and the vernal pool (now dry) on the west side. The video opens with a view of a beautiful canine, provides two angles on a mature buck (with unusual markings, whom we saw in this location last month), startles us with a one-eared black bear (shouldn’t he be asleep by now?), and ends with a flock of turkeys. I left out most of the (many) deer, and the deer hunters 😉 Check out the video, and read on for more information about the canine.
So much to share this month!
November was a busy month in the forests of Lyme, New Hampshire… especially evident because I doubled the number of cameras in late October. Last week, I shared fun video of beavers captured next to one of their dams along a brook near home. Well, beavers weren’t the only visitors to this brook! Today I share two short videos: one showcasing the variety of other critters that follow the beaver’s trail, and the other highlighting animals that cross the brook further downstream.
In this first video, taken alongside a game trail the busy beavers created while dragging trees down to the stream, you’ll see a puzzled buck, a curious raccoon, a busy mouse, and… a special guest. Don’t miss the special guest! and read on for a second video.
A new location allowed me to capture hundreds of videos of beavers.
In late October I purchased a new set of wildlife cameras, which allowed me to move the older cameras to a completely new location. It’s not far from the earlier locations, and located along a brook that has been dammed by beavers. I quickly discovered a path that had clearly been recently (and heavily) used by the beavers, commuting from the water to the woods, where they had felled several trees and must have been dragging the branches back to their pond just upstream of their dam. I placed a pair of cameras on a single tree – one camera pointed uphill toward the woods, and the other aimed downhill toward the water. I placed another camera across the brook where the dam met the shore. Within hours my memory cards were filling with beavers! Read on…
It was a beautiful fall season.
Autumn has ended, and we are now well into what locals call “stick season.” After summer comes the fall, when the hardwood trees turn various shades of yellow, orange, red, and brown, bringing new color to the hilly New Hampshire landscape just before it tucks in for a long winter’s nap. This year we have had a beautiful fall season, with sunny/warm weather and brilliant fall colors. In this quick blog post I want to share a few photos from three of my favorite aspects of autumn at Dartmouth and in New Hampshire: fall foliage, the homecoming bonfire, and Diwali. Read on!
No bears! Maybe they’ve all hibernated.
October was another busy month for the wildlife cameras near my home. As the oaks dropped their leaves, the turkeys and squirrels were busy foraging for acorns and other delicacies. Deer – both does and bucks – were plentiful. I enjoyed the comings and goings of a red fox, trotting past my cameras at all hours of the day and night… as well the plodding of a porcupine. For me, the bobcats are still most exciting – whereas the most interesting may be a tough, scar-faced buck, and the most mysterious is the noctural appearance of some sort of weasel.
This month I have posted just one video – less than seven minutes long – with the highlights. I’ve organized it into three locations, and at each location the clips are presented in chronological order. I find it interesting to see the same location visited by several different critters, all in the same day. Sometimes the predator passes by only a few hours behind their prey!
Continue reading “Wildlife cameras – October”
David Kotz 