This stunning image from the Chinese province of Qinghai called “The Moment,” by photographer Yongqing Bao won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 title
Photo: Yongqing Bao, China - Wildlife Photographer of the Year
High on a ledge on the coast in northern Norway, the photographer carefully positioned an old tree branch that he hoped would make a perfect golden eagle lookout. To this he bolted a tripod head with a camera, flashes and motion sensor attached, and built himself a hide a short distance away. Gradually, over the next three years, a golden eagle got used to the camera and started to use the branch regularly to survey the coast below.
A small herd of male chiru antelopes leaves a trail of footprints on a snow-veiled slope in the Kumukuli Desert of China’s Altun Shan National Nature Reserve. These nimble antelopes – the males with long, slender, black horns – are high-altitude specialists and survive at elevations of up to 5,500 meters , where temperatures fall to -40 ̊C.
This female gelada, with a week-old infant clinging to her belly, climbed over the cliff edge close to where the young photographer was perched with his father on the high plateau in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains National Park. They were there to watch geladas, grass-eating primates found only on the Ethiopian Plateau. Shooting with a low flash to highlight her rich brown fur against the still-dark mountain range, he caught not only her sideways glance but also the eyes of her inquisitive infant.
Pushing against each other, two male Dall’s sheep in full winter-white coats that blend into the snowscape, stand immobile at the end of a fierce clash on a windswept snowy slope. Strong winds, a heavy blizzard and extreme cold forced them into a truce. The photographer spent a month following the sheep in the Yukon, battling with the brutal weather to the point that his feet were succumbing to frostbite, from which it would take months to recover.
Red-hot lava tongues flow into the Pacific Ocean, producing huge plumes of noxious laze, a mix of acid steam and fine glass particles, as they meet the crashing waves. This was the front line of the biggest eruption in 200 years of one of the world’s most active volcanos, Kîlauea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, which started spewing out lava through 24 fissures on its lower East Rift at the start of May, 2018.
At dawn, the colony sent out raiding parties to gather food, mostly other ant species. One night, the colony assembled in the open against a fallen branch prompting a structure spanning 50 centimeters and resembling “a living cathedral with three naves.”Tapestry of Life, 2019 winner, Plants and FungiFestooned with bulging orange velvet, trimmed with grey lace, the arms of a Monterey cypress tree weave an otherworldly canopy over Pinnacle Point, in California’s Point Lobos State Natural Reserve.
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