Wow, 2025 was quite the year. With a dozen or more hikes in New Hampshire, and travels to Australia, England, Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Colorado, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and South Carolina, I had many opportunities for photography. Check out some of my favorite photos!
The second installment in a two-part post of July/August wildlife videos.
Over the past two years, most of my wildlife videos have been captured by cameras placed on a hill near my home. In this post – my final post of wildlife-camera video until next year – I have some pretty neat stuff to share. Lots of bobcats and black bears! Read on to watch both videos.
Wildlife and Fourth of July holiday in South Carolina.
We spent a few days in Charleston SC around the Fourth of July holiday. It allowed me to enjoy time with family, swimming and boating on the Ashley River, dining in some excellent restaurants, and photographing wildlife.
The month of June brings the onset of summer – and the emergence of wildlife babies. In this month’s episode of clips from my wildlife cameras, you’ll see young’uns from two or three species, and some really interesting behavior from a raccoon, deer, porcupine, barred owl, and black bear. Sit back, relax, and enjoy!
In the Lyme forest, my usual tromping grounds include a couple of vernal pools. These small, shallow depressions fill with water in the spring – initially, from melting snow that cannot yet seep into the still-frozen earth below, and later from early spring rains. They teem with life, and are a particularly important breeding ground for amphibians. They also attract wildlife of all types, to hunt or to drink. I saved aside the clips from my two cameras beside one vernal pool – not included in my April videos shared two weeks ago – because the activity around this pool is so fascinating. It also provides my first ever view of predation in action, in almost two years of work with wildlife cameras.
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!
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.
August treats us to bears, coyotes, a bathing owl, and more!
I woke at 2am to the howls of the coyotes, and they sounded close. It’s increasingly common for us to hear coyotes near our home, but in 33 years living in New Hampshire I’ve only once seen a coyote in-person. (They are mostly noctural, and I am not!) As noted in my post from June, I was thrilled when my wildlife camera caught a daylight video with a litter of coyote pups visiting a vernal pool. So, as I lay awake listening to the coyotes last night, I imagined those little pups were out there now, learning the ways of their pack, and wondered whether they might be in view of of one of my cameras.
Indeed my cameras brought us many exciting treats in August: a pack of coyotes, many views of both mama and papa bear (and baby bears too!), a fastidious barred owl, a nosy skunk, and more.
My wildlife cameras have been busy this month! With the return of spring, I placed a camera back down by the riverside… and started capturing the daily visits of a couple of Canada Geese and their brood of little goslings. As the weeks wore by, the goslings grew bigger… and fewer. (We started with four, then three, then two.) They were fun to watch, but the really cool stuff came later. Read on!
As regular readers know, I have placed several wildlife cameras in a forest near home, and have captured many enjoyable videos of wildlife like deer, bear, fox, coyote, bobcat, turkey, and more. The same cameras can be set to capture photos on a regular schedule, which can later be stitched into a timelapse video. Back in March, a few days before the spring equinox, I placed a camera at the edge of what I knew to be a vernal pool; this month, a few days after the summer solstice, I removed the camera. The camera snapped an image every five minutes from sunrise to sunset, resulting in 14,697 images. Watch the pool evolve from a snowy landscape into a lush fern-filled glade. Watch the heavy snow of March 23 lay its burden on the branches, and then watch those branches relax on March 23 and 25; watch the pool freeze and then re-thaw; watch the April 4th snowstorm bury the pool once again; watch snow melt and the grasses stretch toward the April sun; watch the ferns unfurl into the May sunshine. Below is an abbreviated timelapse, one photo per day at noon. See the full-res noon-time video (1 minute), and the full-length video (10 minutes). If you watch very, very closely, you might see a animal or two.