Caught in the Act

Words and photos by Nathaniel Peck

It’s a calm spring evening in the Allegheny Mountains. With close to 40 pounds of camera gear in my backpack, I’m awkwardly weaving through the dense understory of a deciduous forest, closely following a small path beaten down by wildlife. I’m on the trail of one of the most iconic animals in the east, the black bear (Ursus americanus). Frequent piles of seed-filled scat along the path tell me I’m looking in the right place.

Just ahead, the game trail leads through a small, mossy patch—a perfect spot to set up my camera trap. I unload my gear and start the hours-long process of setting up my system.

Camera trapping is the art of leaving stationary digital cameras outdoors to capture high-quality images of nocturnal or elusive animals in their natural habitat. A camera trapping kit usually includes a digital camera, a motion detector, and several off-camera flashes. When an animal walks past the motion detector, a signal is instantly sent to the camera and flashes, telling them to wake up and take a picture.

When choosing a composition, I try my best to imagine where the animal I’m hoping to photograph—in this case, the bear—might be walking, resting, or feeding. I decide to point the camera perpendicular to the trail and set up the off-camera flashes—these will illuminate the picture if the bear, or anything else, strolls by at night.

After setting the motion detector up and taking some test shots, it’s time for me to leave the scene. Now the waiting game begins. I’ll return in a week to change the camera batteries and check the memory card to see if I captured any worthy shots.

While I love spending time outdoors to capture handheld images of my favorite animals, some creatures—no matter how good of a tracker you are—are nearly impossible to find and photograph in person. In those cases, camera trapping allows me to capture extremely high-resolution photos of animals—often engaged in candid behaviors—that we are unlikely to see with our own eyes.

Although camera trapping might seem lazy to some, a lot of painstaking work goes into getting the perfect image. Simply setting up the camera at a random location in the woods and hoping an animal walks by usually results in failure. Having extensive animal tracking knowledge—such as being able to identify footprints and scat they leave behind, or being able to pattern their movements so you know where they’ll be—is extremely useful for camera trapping, as it helps you find signs like animal trails, scent posts, carcasses, and dens.

But even after finding an ideal spot, it can still take months or even years of fine-tuning the process before capturing that dream photo. Oftentimes, the motion sensor picks up on the wind and takes a thousand photos in a single day, draining the camera’s battery. Or maybe a curious bear comes by, knocking the camera over as it sniffs around. Alternatively, flashes can malfunction and misfire, resulting in a dark image even though the motion sensor and camera successfully did their jobs. Beyond the technical difficulties, animals can smell your musky human scent on the camera and often won’t approach it. Speaking of scents, a camera trap by a carcass might result in thousands of images of scavenging birds that quickly fill the memory cards and drain the batteries. These are but a few hardships that camera trappers face, but the hard work—and frustration—is worth it when you check your camera and find your dream photo on the screen.

One of the most captivating animals in the Central Appalachians is the fisher (Pekania pennanti ), a large, carnivorous member of the mustelid family. I’ve made it my life’s work to photograph them, and they appear frequently as subjects in my camera trap work. But they sure don’t make it easy to get good images of them. Most of my winter days are spent following their tracks for miles through the most rugged parts of our snowy forests, hoping their trails will lead me to a carcass on which they’ll return time and time again to feed, or to a scent post on which they frequently urinate and defecate to communicate with each other.

I’ll never forget the first time I got a photograph of a fisher on my camera trap. As soon as I saw the image, I sat on the ground crying with excitement for a few minutes while frantically texting everyone I knew. Looking back after several years of tracking and photographing fishers, the image is objectively pretty bad, but I’ll forever cherish that feeling of all my hard work paying off. For me, there’s nothing more rewarding than a successful fisher photo.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to document a lot of rarely seen wildlife and interesting behavior on my camera trap. One time, I was setting up a camera pointed at a mossy log near a trail in a dense rhododendron thicket in hopes that something would stroll by and hop on the log. When I checked the trap a few weeks later, I was quite surprised to find that a bear had visited the log just an hour after I had finished setting up the camera.

More recently, I was setting up by a deer carcass, hoping that a fisher would come in. For several weeks, nothing but an opossum (Didelphis virginiana) stopped by. I was changing the batteries weekly and was very close to moving the camera when I noticed a new visitor, my beloved fisher. Based on the small size, I could tell this fisher was a female, and much to my surprise, she had shown up at the same time as the opossum and tried to fight it off the carcass. While her attempt did not work, she did come back a few hours later when the opossum had left and was able to dine in peace.

Clockwise from top left: A red-tailed hawk swoops down for a treat; raccoons (Procyon lotor) feast on a carcass; a porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) trods across snow; an opossum (Didelphis virginiana) caught in the act; a fisher (Pekania pennanti ) says cheeeeeeese; a nosy black bear (Ursus americanus) walks the plank.

Previous: A black bear searching for snacks.

One of my all-time favorite experiences was finding and photographing a porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) den deep in the backcountry. I found a small cave and noticed lots of porcupine scat at the entrance. I set up a trail cam and came back a month later, finding that it had filmed hundreds of videos of porcupines, so I knew I had to install a proper camera trap to capture a high-quality image. But I didn’t want to set up right beside the den and stress them out, so I waited until it snowed and followed their tracks a few hundred yards from the den to set up along one of their common trails. Over the next few weeks, I was lucky enough to capture several images of them traversing their trails at night, likely along the way to feed on their preferred tree bark.

While I mostly pursue handheld photography, camera trapping is one of the only ways I’ve found to capture candid images of natural animal behavior, completely free of the ever-encroaching influence of humans. This unique form of photography has allowed me to experience wildlife in a way otherwise not possible. I hope that sharing these rare images of otherwise elusive animals can inspire us all to work together to promote their conservation. w

Nathaniel Peck is an avid nature photographer focusing on the landscapes, wildlife, and caves of the Allegheny Highlands.