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!
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.
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”Spoiler alert: Not all the cameras survived!
September was a busy month in the forests of Lyme New Hampshire, as the foliage started to turn and forest residents began their preparations for winter. This month I’m organizing the videos by location – with each video mostly in chronological order. It’s interesting to see the variety of animals that pass by a given point – sometimes within minutes of each other. I captured first-looks at two species I’ve never seen on camera before: a solo flying squirrel, and a group of strolling crows, both foraging among the leaf litter. Unfortunately, one of my cameras did not survive the month! Read on.
Continue reading “Wildlife cameras – September”Searching for history in the alpine forests of Mount Moosilauke.
Some of my friends have, for several years, been interested in locating a long-lost trail on Mount Moosilauke, one dating back to 1880… and that allegedly led down from the summit to a ledge overlooking Jobildunc Ravine, with a fine view of its watery cascades. With the thin information available in old documents and oral histories, we first tried to find the viewpoint – which supposedly had an iron railing to protect guests from the steep cliffs below – in June 2022. Today, after some in our group had carefully studied recent maps (satellite images, aerial photographs, and LIDAR scans), we set out again. It was a glorious fall day to bash about in the woods. Did we find it? Read on!
A new comet!
September treated us to a lunar eclipse, which I had the opportunity to photograph, and now October has brought us a good view of celestial visitor C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The evening sky was clear last night, but it took quite a while for me to find this new comet – still far above the western horizon more than an hour and twenty minutes after sunset. My first glimpse appeared in my peripheral vision – it was easier to see what I was not looking directly at it. I finally lined up my camera for a couple of decent shots.
David Kotz 