2023 National Wildlife Photo Contest Winners
What a flock of talent! See the double-take-inducing winners of the 2023 National Wildlife Photo Contest.
- By Jennifer Wehunt
- PhotoZone
- Dec 20, 2023
SOME PHOTOS ARE EYE-POPPING, some melt the heart, and some make us lean in closer. We had all of those reactions and so many more while judging our 52nd annual photo contest: a roller coaster of images and emotions totaling nearly 40,000 entries from more than 4,000 photographers. Congrats to all, including Suliman Alatiqi, who placed in both the Birds and People in Nature categories, and to two teens who were up at 4 a.m. to secure first- and second-place bragging rights in Young Nature Photographers. You know what they say: The early bird gets the photo. On that note, the 2024 contest opens January 17. Good luck!
See 64 stunning honorable mentions and People’s Choice picks from our 52nd annual photo contest »
GRAND PRIZE
Anup Shah
Chippenham, England
“It is powerful and decisive, the pace compact yet energetic,” says Anup Shah of this year’s spectacular top photo, catching zebras at the edge of a river crossing in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. “I wanted the viewer to feel the energy in the path of a galloping herd.” We do, and it’s exhilarating.
BABY ANIMALS
FIRST PLACE
Torie Hilley
Ventura, California
Torie Hilley trudged through the mudflats of Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park and Preserve with a professional guide in July 2022, hoping to catch this coastal brown bear and her cubs in a line as they dug for clams. When Hilley spotted the family falling into formation on her last day, she dropped to one knee to preserve the moment. She later learned not all of the cubs survived the following weeks. “It reminded me to never take anything for granted,” she says.
BABY ANIMALS
SECOND PLACE
Carl D. Walsh
Dayton, Maine
Listed as endangered by Maine, the state’s piping plover population has seen some improvement in recent decades—a hopeful note suggested by the glow surrounding this days-old fledgling. To get this July 2022 photo, Carl D. Walsh “spent a lot of time lying in the sand, trying to capture the right vantage point and backlight” on a Cumberland County beach. “Many thousands of frames were shot,” he says.
BIRDS
FIRST PLACE
Suliman Alatiqi
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Noticing that the brown boobies of Mexico’s San Benedicto Island spent a lot of time floating on the ocean’s surface with their heads submerged, Suliman Alatiqi decided to try and photograph them. As this bird dipped its face underwater at short intervals in search of fish, “I waited in position to try and get both of its eyes looking down,” Alatiqi says. Bingo!
BIRDS
SECOND PLACE
Sunil Gopalan
Middleton, Wisconsin
The lights on the stern of a tourist boat anchored at night in the Galápagos attracted lots of small fish, says Sunil Gopalan. Those fish, in turn, drew two very different types of predators: several Galápagos sharks and a brown pelican, which seemed to be aware of its submarine competition. “You have to look carefully to see what is happening here, but that is part of the allure,” Gopalan says.
LANDSCAPES & PLANTS
FIRST PLACE
Jessica Sory
Jenison, Michigan
Jessica Sory loves prairie smoke—a fact her husband knew when he proposed to her in a
field of it. She captured this scene of her favorite wildflower’s seed heads at Hemlock Crossing in West Olive, Michigan, where she worked as a naturalist guide. Even off duty during COVID shutdowns, “I was trying to spend as much time in nature as I could,” she says.
LANDSCAPES & PLANTS
SECOND PLACE
Howard Jennings
Cadyville, New York
Over years of trips photographing Kauai, Hawai‘i, and its Nāpali Coast, Howard Jennings found the perfect spot: “The winter surf comes in and bounces off the cliffs. As it returns, it collides with an incoming wave,” producing what he calls a fan wave, such as this one from February 2022. “Each collision causes a unique creation, like our fingerprints or snowflakes.”
MAMMALS
FIRST PLACE
Saleel Tambe
Croydon, England
“The weather in the U.K. is always a challenge for wildlife photography,” says Saleel Tambe, but “I managed to click a golden moment, when the rising sun was available right behind the stag’s antlers.” As rutting season neared its peak, Tambe caught this male red deer with a puff of steam midcall, fern adorning its crown—two strategies for attracting females.
MAMMALS
SECOND PLACE
Patricia Bauchman
Big Sky, Montana
For eight days, this bobcat guarded and dined on a mule deer along the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park. “This particular scene was pretty pure of gore, thanks to an overnight dump of snow,” Patricia Bauchman says. “No other predators ever encroached, other than a few hopeful ravens. [The bobcat] ate the whole thing.”
MOBILE
FIRST PLACE
Laura Johnson
Conroe, Texas
We promise we had already chosen Laura Johnson as our Mobile winner when we received this response from her: “I can remember how excited I was as a child when my mom got me Ranger Rick® magazines! I then grew to love National Wildlife® and always thought how amazing it would be to take such beautiful pictures and share them with others!” She captured these tree frog prints on a banana leaf in her very own backyard. Now that’s what we call a natural.
MOBILE
SECOND PLACE
Hieu Tran
San Francisco, California
On a guided trip off the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia, Hieu Tran's group received a surprise “swim-by” from a mother humpback whale. “I felt as if she was triple-checking that we were harmless,” says Tran, who then watched as the whale’s calf, pictured, put on a 20-minute dance show before the mother returned and led the baby away.
OTHER WILDLIFE
FIRST PLACE
Kat Zhou
San Francisco, California
A Caribbean reef octopus guards her eggs off the coast of West Palm Beach, Florida. Alerted by a diving companion to the octopus’ location inside a pipe, Kat Zhou captured what she calls a “bittersweet” scene at a safe distance. “Like all other species of octopus, this mother does not eat while she tends to her eggs, and she will die after they hatch,” Zhou says.
OTHER WILDLIFE
SECOND PLACE
Anirban Dutta
Cooch Behar, India
While red spider mites in their web are surprisingly photogenic, they’re also highly destructive to the plants on which they feed. Nonetheless, Anirban Dutta, who spotted them in his yard, sees beauty, comparing them to the folds of a printed chiffon saree: “As a macro photographer, I have always tried to search and show the unique and unseen small world.”
PEOPLE IN NATURE
FIRST PLACE
Emily Fisher
Bedford, New York
On an 11-week, 24-state road trip during the COVID-19 pandemic, Emily Fisher and her family made plenty of memories, from spotting rattlesnakes and roadrunners to an emergency dental visit. But sledding the dunes at White Sands National Park in New Mexico was one of her three children’s favorites. “It was a day we’ll never forget,” she says.
PEOPLE IN NATURE
SECOND PLACE
Suliman Alatiqi
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Two-time 2023 honoree Suliman Alatiqi photographed both the winning brown booby and this free diver in Mexico. “Cenote Maravilla is an empty sinkhole with virtually nothing to see,” he says of the underwater spot off the Yucatán Peninsula. But at noon, the sun’s rays penetrate its depths, providing what Alatiqi calls a “spiritual experience.”
YOUNG NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS
FIRST PLACE
Gustav Parenmark
Gävle, Sweden
Want a tip for photographing insects? Catch the skittish creatures when they’re sleeping, says Gustav Parenmark, who was 16 when he took this photo in July 2022. After heading out around 4 a.m. on the Swedish island of Fårö, “I found this gorgeous male emerald damselfly resting near water,” he says.
YOUNG NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS
SECOND PLACE
Anton Trexler
Wiesbaden, Germany
It was also around 4 a.m. when Anton Trexler, then 17, caught this garden dormouse—listed as near threatened in parts of Europe—on camera during his summer 2022 break from school. “I have spent several evenings and nights outside, just watching these little hyperactive animals climbing down the ladder of my attic when the sun sets and the city begins to sleep,” he says.
PORTFOLIO
FIRST PLACE
Glen Serbin
Santa Barbara, California
Shooting in the tradition of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, Glen Serbin traveled to Antarctica in December 2022 to capture these moment-in-time portraits of ever-shifting sea ice. “Each iceberg is unique and a work of art,” Serbin says, with its “own history and form.” They’re also increasing in number, with climate change causing glaciers to calve at an accelerating rate.
