Fascinating Wildlife Photography Contest

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Ekaterina Bee, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

The first image, if you turn left as you enter the fascinating, overwhelming and resoundingly popular Wildlife Photographer of the Year show at the Royal BC Museum, shows two herring gulls in flight. It’s amusing in the way airborne gulls so often are, with their oversized feet and intense goggle-eyed countenances. There’s a sinuous arc to their wingspreads, one bird almost enfolding the other, but a winner in a contest with almost 50,000 entries from 92 countries? Then you check the caption. The photographer is a five-year-old from Italy. Ekaterina Bee used bread to entice the birds and then, entranced by the noise of their beating wings, snapped this charming image with a Nikon D90.

The annual contest, organized by the Natural History Museum in London and on view until April 2 in Victoria, the sole Western Canadian venue, has been around for more than 50 years, time enough to figure out how to best organize 100 photographs to maximize their popular appeal. While perhaps not strictly art, the show has plenty of artistry, as well as a strong message about the need to protect a natural world under increasing threat from a burgeoning human population.

The show’s format – it has 16 categories, including portraits, behaviour, under water, plants and fungi, and even the Earth itself – offers many opportunities to compare favourites and debate why the judges selected particular works. The caption panels are marvels of brevity, ably summarizing needed context and offering interesting tidbits about the animals, whether odd habits or mating rituals worthy of a #MeToo campaign.

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Qing Lin, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

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Laurent Ballesta, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

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The texts can unlock thrilling aha moments. What seems to be some sort of otherworldly fantasia is actually a Mexican forest thick with monarch butterflies captured in the glowing light before sunset by Spaniard Jaime Rojo. A huge amorphous underwater blob, its skin rough and gouged, documented by France’s Laurent Ballesta, turns out to be the underside of an iceberg eerily lit by the torches of three divers. One of the best examples is an image by Qing Lin, who splits his time between Toronto and China. It takes a minute to realize that tiny eyes are peering from the mouths of each of three anemone fish. They belong to parasitic isopods (squeamish alert) that attach to the tongue of the fish, sucking its blood until the tongue withers away. It took six dives to capture the three fish lined up and facing forward with their mouths open. The patience and cunning of photographers  is an ongoing theme in the show.

It's a clever move to place the youth categories at the start of the show. Visitors can't help but share their wonder with each other. Angela Williams, the museum’s deputy CEO, probably summed it up best: “I could barely operate a camera at that age." Ditto her aversive reaction to a photo of a trapdoor spider taken by an enterprising boy in Malaysia, Adam Hakim Hogg, a finalist in the under-10 category. He and his dad set up gear in the rainforest during the day and then returned in darkness to the nocturnal insect’s silk-lined nest, hidden in the ground and laced with gossamer trip lines to alert it to potential prey. “When the spider does come out, it’s like a bullet,” says Hogg. “It makes you jump every time.”

Also in the under-10 category are three images by what seems to be a brother and sister from Estonia. (That lack of clarity is a rare lapse in the captions.) Evalotta Zacek took a ground-level shot of a hedgehog crossing a road, while Fred focused on a songbird killed in the front grill of his family’s car. His second image, though, an otter hunting in winter, is a real showstopper. Amid a flurry of water droplets caught in mid-air is the otter, fangs bared. On the ice, on its back, webbed feet fanned wide, a moor frog. “The sound of the otter’s sharp teeth chewing through a frog as if it was a sandwich was unforgettable,” says Fred.

On a nearby wall, photographers aged 11 to 14, have moved on to wolves, lynx and even a  bear with her cub. This category includes Canadian finalist Josiah Launstein, whose portrait of a monkey moth caterpillar was taken in Thailand. The caterpillar, which has long, water-repellent hairs, was photographed after it had rained, silhouetted against an overcast sky. “I love how the water drops and hair clusters make it look like water is squirting out of it like little fountains,” says Launstein, who lives in Blairmore, Alta., with a family of photographers.

• Related story from CBC Arts regarding Josiah Launstein

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Josiah Launstein, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

The show has light-hearted moments: who can resist Stefano Unterthiner’s image of a kestrel escaping a cat or a photo by John Mullineux that shows the acrobatic leaps of impalas evading a hungry crocodile at a watering hole in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. But some images are more challenging. One, by American Michael Cohen, shows two lions taking down a giraffe, its escape hampered by deformed hooves.

The hardest pictures to look at, though, are those that document human brutality. Such is the case with the contest’s overall winner, South African photojournalist Brent Stirton. His photograph shows a black rhino crumpled to its knees, its horn hacked off and the carcass left to rot after it was shot by poachers. Black rhino populations are declining, with only a few thousand remaining. Lewis Blackwell, the chair of the contest’s jury, explains the choice of the winning photo as “a call to action” for people to join together and stop such destruction. “There is a horrible intimacy to the photograph,” he says. “It draws us in and invites us to explore our response and responsibility.”

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Brent Stirton, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Another difficult picture shows four Asian elephants in a Malaysian forest that has been cleared for a palm-oil plantation. It was taken by photojournalist Aaron ‘Bertie’ Gekoski, who notes such elephants are often poisoned or shot by plantation workers.

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Aaron 'Bertie' Gekoski, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Wildlife Photographer of the Year prompts a complex mix of emotions – from awe and wonder to sadness and anger. The show is accompanied by an excellent catalogue and an expansive website. While neither is as exciting as seeing the larger, backlit images in person, they are options if you’re not in Victoria. It is a pity the show can’t be seen elsewhere in Western Canada. Touring a show is far less costly to the environment than having thousands of people travel to it, so, in a sense, institutional desires for exclusive geographic rights actually work against the broader values of boosting awareness, mobilizing action and mitigating ecological crisis.

As well, it would be useful for venues to give viewers ideas about how best to support conservation. While such choices may be fraught with political implications, particularly in a global context, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when confronted with so many problems and end up doing nothing. Empowering people to assist particular wildlife campaigns or lessen their consumption of palm oil, or whatever actions the experts deem most effective, might encourage a wider collective response.

And one final thought: it's hard to mistake the unmistakable privilege of photographers who have the resources to buy expensive gear and take far-flung trips. Levelling the playing field with more accessible categories – perhaps for images shot with cellphones, taken close to home or the like – might send a stronger message that we are all in this together.

These quibbles, however, shouldn’t outweigh the wonder of a show that focuses attention on many fascinating aspects of a natural world from which most of us are increasingly estranged. These photographs remind us that we lose our intimate connections with a rich and complex nature not only at our own peril, but also at the peril of the other forms of life that share the planet.