15 winners from Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017
Photojournalist Brent Stirton has won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 title for his compelling image Memorial to a species, which frames a recently shot and de-horned black rhino in South Africa’s Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Reserve.
Once the most numerous rhino species, black rhinos are now critically endangered due to poaching and the illegal international trade in rhino horn, one of the world’s most corrupt illegal wildlife networks.
For the photographer, the crime scene was one of more than thirty he visited in the course of covering this tragic story.
Natural History Museum Director Sir Michael Dixon says ‘Brent’s image highlights the urgent need for humanity to protect our planet and the species we share it with.’
‘The black rhino offers a sombre and challenging counterpart to the story of ‘Hope’ our blue whale. Like the critically endangered black rhinoceros, blue whales were once hunted to the brink of extinction, but humanity acted on a global scale to protect them. This shocking picture of an animal butchered for its horns is a call to action for us all.’
Australian photographer Justin Gilligan was the winner of the behaviour: invertebrates category, with a stunning image of a Maori octopus feasting on a massive aggregation of giant spider crabs off the coast of Tasmania. A similar image bagged Gilligan the ANZANG nature title earlier this year.
Daniël Nelson took the award for Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 with his charismatic portrait of a young western lowland gorilla from the Republic of Congo, lounging on the forest floor whilst feeding on fleshy African breadfruit. Daniël’s image captures the inextricable similarity between wild apes and humans, and the importance of the forest on which they depend.
The two images were selected from 16 category winners, depicting the incredible diversity of life on our planet, from displays of rarely seen animal behaviour to hidden underwater worlds. Images from professional and amateur photographers are selected by a panel of industry-recognised professionals for their originality, artistry and technical complexity.
Beating almost 50,000 entries from 92 countries, Brent’s image will be on show with 99 other images selected by an international panel of judges at the fifty-third Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.
![Giant gathering
Tony Wu, USA
Winner 2017, Behaviour: Mammals
Dozens of sperm whales mingled noisily off Sri Lanka’s northeast coast, stacked as far down as Tony could see. This was part of something special – a congregation of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of social units, like a kind of gathering of the clans. Sperm whales are intelligent, long-lived and gregarious, and groups play, forage, interact and communicate in different ways and have distinctive cultures. Aggregations like this could be a critical part of their rich, social lives but are rarely reported. Some two thirds of the sperm whale population was wiped out during the peak of industrialized whaling in the twentieth century.](http://yaffa-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/yaffadsp/images/dmImage/StandardImage/Giant-gathering---Tony-Wu---Wildlife-Photographer-of-the-Year.jpg)
![The ancient ritual
Brian Skerry, USA
Winner 2017, Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles
Like generations before her, the leatherback turtle shifts her considerable weight with her outsized, strong front flippers and moves steadily back to the ocean. Leatherbacks are the largest, deepest-diving and widest-ranging sea turtles, the only survivors of an evolutionary lineage that diverged from other sea turtles 100–150 million years ago. Much of their lives are spent at sea, shrouded in mystery. When mature, their leathery shells now averaging 1.6 metres (5 feet 3 inches) long, females return to the shores where they themselves hatched to lay their own eggs. Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge on St Croix, in the US Virgin Islands, provides critical nesting habitat, successfully managed for decades. Elsewhere, leatherbacks are not so lucky, threatened primarily by fisheries bycatch as well as factors including human consumption, coastal development and climate change.](http://yaffa-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/yaffadsp/images/dmImage/StandardImage/The-ancient-ritual---Brian-Skerry---Wildlife-Photographer-of-the-Year.jpg)
![The incubator bird
Gerry Pearce, UK/Australia
Winner 2017, Behaviour: Birds
Most birds incubate their eggs with their bodies. Not so the Australian brush turkey, one of a handful of birds – the megapodes – that do it with an oven. Only the males oversee incubation. In this case, a male had chosen to create his nest‑mound near Gerry’s home in Sydney, bordering Garigal National Park. It took a month to build, out of leaves, soil and other debris, at which point it was more than a metre high – mounds used year after year can be more than 4 metres (13 feet) wide and 2 metres (6 feet 7 inches) high. The brush turkey then invited a succession of females to mate with him. If he and his mound were to their liking, they would lay a clutch of eggs in the mound.](http://yaffa-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/yaffadsp/images/dmImage/StandardImage/The-incubator-bird---Gerry-Pearce---Wildlife-Photographer-of-the-Year.jpg)
![The night raider
Marcio Cabral, Brazil
Winner 2017, Animals in Their Environment
It was the start of the rainy season, but though the night was humid, there were no clouds, and under the starry sky, the termite mounds now twinkled with intense green lights. For three seasons, Marcio had camped out in Brazil’s cerrado region, on the vast treeless savannah of Emas National Park, waiting for the right conditions to capture the light display. It happens when winged termites take to the sky to mate.](http://yaffa-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/yaffadsp/images/dmImage/StandardImage/The-night-raider---Marcio-Cabral---Wildlife-Photographer-of-the-Year.jpg)