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The golden couple by Marsel van Oosten, The Netherlands. Grand Title Winner 2018, Animal Portraits. A male Qinling golden snub-nosed monkey rests briefly on a stone seat. He has been joined by a female from his small group. Both are watching intently as an altercation takes place down the valley between the lead males of two other groups in the 50-strong troop. It’s spring in the temperate forest of China’s Qinling Mountains, the only place where these endangered monkeys live. They spend most of the day foraging in the trees, eating a mix of leaves, buds, seeds, bark and lichen, depending on the season.
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Mud-rolling mud-dauber by Georgina Steytler, Australia. Winner 2018, Behaviour: Invertebrates. It was a hot summer day, and the waterhole at Walyormouring Nature Reserve, Western Australia, was buzzing. Georgina had got there early to photograph birds, but her attention was stolen by the industrious slender mud-dauber wasps, distinctive with their stalk-like first abdominal segments. They were females, busy digging in the soft mud at the water’s edge, and then rolling the mud into balls to create egg chambers to add to their nearby nests.
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Lounging leopard by Skye Meaker, South Africa. Grand Title Winner 2018, 15-17 Years Old. Mathoja was dozing when they finally found her, lying along a low branch of a nyala tree. And she continued to doze all the time they were there, unfazed by the vehicle. ‘She would sleep for a couple of minutes. Then look around briefly. Then fall back to sleep,’ says Skye.
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The vision by Jan van der Greef, The Netherlands. Winner 2018, Black and White. Perfectly balanced, its wings vibrating, its tail opening and closing, with its tiny feet touching the spike for just an instant, an eastern mountaineer hummingbird siphons nectar from the florets of a red-hot-poker plant. Positioned by the flower, Jan had anticipated the bird’s behaviour. For a number of days he had been stationed in the garden of his hotel in southern Peru, observing hummingbirds. He noticed that an eastern mountaineer – a species found only in Peru, characterized by its long, black-and-white forked tail – would rotate around the red-hot-poker spikes as it fed. He also saw that, when the bird moved behind a spike and its tail closed for a moment, a beautiful cross appeared. Determining to capture this strange vision, he staked out a spot underneath a single red-hot-poker plant (native to Africa, where it is pollinated by nectar‑drinkers such as sunbirds).
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Signature tree by Alejandro Prieto, Mexico. Winner 2018, Wildlife Photojournalist Award: Story. A male jaguar sharpens his claws and scratches his signature into a tree on the edge of his mountain territory in the Sierra de Vallejo in Mexico’s western state of Nayarit. The boundary-post has been chosen with care – the tree has soft bark, allowing for deep scratch marks that are a clear warning, backed by pungent scent, not to trespass. Alejandro set up his custom-built camera trap some 6 metres (20 feet) up the tree and returned every month to change the batteries. Eight months elapsed before the jaguar eventually returned to this corner of his realm to refresh his mark.
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Hellbent by David Herasimtschuk, USA. Winner 2018, Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles. It was not looking good for the northern water snake, clamped tightly in the jaws of a hungry hellbender, but it was a remarkable find for David. Drifting downstream in Tennessee’s Tellico River, in search of freshwater life (as he had done for countless hours over the past seven years), he was thrilled to spot the mighty amphibian with its struggling prey. North America’s largest aquatic salamander – up to 75 centimetres (29 inches) long – the hellbender has declined significantly because of habitat loss and degradation of the habitat that remains.
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Pipe owls by Arshdeep Singh, India. Winner 2018, 10 Years and Under. Huddled together at the opening of an old waste-pipe, two spotted owlets look straight into Arshdeep’s lens. He and his father had been driving out of Kapurthala, a city in the Indian state of Punjab, going on a birding trip, when he saw one of them dive into the pipe. His father didn’t believe what he’d seen but stopped the car and backed up. It wasn’t long before one of the owlets popped its head out. Guessing this might be a nest site and keen to photograph such an unusual setting, Arshdeep begged to borrow his father’s camera and telephoto lens. Using skills accrued from photographing birds since he was six years old, Arshdeep rested the lens on the car’s open window and waited.
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Mother defender by Javier Aznar González de Rueda, Spain. Winner 2018, Wildlife Photographer Portfolio Award. A large Alchisme treehopper guards her family as the nymphs feed on the stem of a nightshade plant in El Jardín de los Sueños reserve in Ecuador. Unlike many treehoppers, which enlist the help of other insects (mostly ants), this species is guarded by the mother alone. She lays her eggs on the underside of a nightshade leaf, covers them with a thin secretion and then shields the clutch with her tiny frame.
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Dream duel by Michel d’Oultremont, Belgium. Winner 2018, Rising Star Portfolio Award. As storm clouds gathered over the Ardennes forest in Belgium, Michel hid behind a tree under a camouflage net. It was the best spot for viewing any action on the ridge – a place he knew well – but he needed luck for all the elements to come together.
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Night flight by Michael Patrick O’Neill, USA. Winner 2018, Under Water. On a night dive over deep water – in the Atlantic, far off Florida’s Palm Beach – Michael achieved a long-held goal, to photograph a flying fish so as to convey the speed, motion and beauty of this ‘fantastic creature’.
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The sad clown by Joan de la Malla, Spain
Winner 2018, Wildlife Photojournalism
Timbul, a young long-tailed macaque, instinctively puts his hand to his face to try to relieve the discomfort of the mask he has to wear. His owner is training him to stand upright so that he can add more stunts to his street‑show repertoire (the word Badut on the hat means clown). Joan spent a long time gaining the trust of the monkey owners in Surabaya. ‘They are not bad people,’ he says, ‘and by doing street shows, they can afford to send their children to school. They just need other opportunities to make a living.’
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Blood thirsty by Thomas P Peschak, Germany/South Africa
Winner 2018, Behaviour: Birds. When rations run short on Wolf Island, in the remote northern Galápagos, the sharp-beaked ground finches become vampires. Their sitting targets are Nazca boobies and other large birds on the plateau. Boobies thrive here, nesting among dense cactus thickets and fishing in the surrounding ocean, but the finches have a tougher time. The island has no permanent water and little rainfall. The finches – among the species that inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution – rely on a scant diet of seeds and insects, which regularly dries up. Pecking away at the base of booby flight feathers with their sharp beaks – a trait that may have evolved from feeding on the birds’ parasites – they drink blood to survive. ‘I’ve seen more than half a dozen finches drinking from a single Nazca booby,’ says Tom. Rather than leave and expose their eggs and chicks to the sun, the boobies appear to tolerate the vampires.
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Bed of seals by Cristobal Serrano, Spain. Winner 2018, Animals in their environment. A small ice floe in the Errera Channel at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula provides barely enough room for a group of crabeater seals to rest, and the cracks are starting to show. It’s the end of summer in the Antarctic, and so sea ice here is in short supply.
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Crossing paths by Marco Colombo, Italy. Winner 2018, Urban Wildlife. A shadowy movement caught Marco’s eye as he drove slowly through a village in the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park in Italy’s Apennine Mountains. It was late evening, and he thought there was a chance that it might be a Marsican brown bear rather than a deer waiting to cross the road. Stopping the car, he switched off the lights to avoid stressing the animal. He had just a few minutes to change lenses and prepare to take a shot through the windscreen before the bear walked out of the shadows and across the road, disappearing into the dark of the woods.
