fisher – David Kotz

2024 favorites

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!

Aurora borealis seen over the Northern Lights Village in Saariselkä, Finland.

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!

Equipment:

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.

Wildlife camera – February

New cameras and exciting footage!

As you may recall from my prior blog post, I purchased and deployed two more wildlife cameras, allowing me to explore several interesting locations simultaneously. I quickly captured some exciting video of a fisher, a small but fearsome predator I’ve never truly seen in the wild. The new cameras were blurry, and flaky; after numerous iterations with tech support they sent me two new cameras. So I have lots of video to share this month! Check out this new video of the fisher, nice and clear. Later, watch the deer sniff my camera.
Read on, though, for the most exciting video!

Wildlife camera – January

Deer, fox, coyote, and fisher!

Winter has been fickle this year – bringing us some good snowfalls, but also tremendously warm weather and bare ground. I expanded my set of wildlife cameras from two to four, and explored several new locations in the forest near my home. Check out the video! I caught many videos of white-tailed deer, including an interesting behavior: food is scarce for them in winter, so they browse on the thin branches of hemlock trees. I placed a camera next to a fresh fallen hemlock, surrounded by deer tracks, indicating they come often to nibble.

I also caught two red fox running by on a brilliant sunny day and a glimpse of a coyote trotting by in the middle of the night. Most exciting, though, was the fisher, a well-known local animal I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen. “The fisher (Pekania pennanti) is a carnivorous mammal native to North America, a forest-dwelling creature whose range covers much of the boreal forest in Canada to the northern United States. … It is sometimes referred to as a fisher cat, although it is not a cat.” [Wikipedia] Indeed, Wikipedia’s image of the fisher in its winter coat is a dead ringer for what we see in my video:

By http://www.ForestWander.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 us, Link

Unfortunately, my fisher video came from one of the two new cameras, which seem to be perpetually out of focus. I’ve tried numerous tests and fixes, and communicated with tech support, to no avail. They are sending replacement cameras, so I hope February will bring me more clear video!