Best wildlife photos of 2013

My Modern Met, an art site that doesn’t seem to be connected with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, has just published the results of its Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013 contest. And the prizewinners are great—even better than National Geographic’s annual winners.

I’m putting up seven out of 18 photographs, and it was a hard choice. I’ve also copied the captions so you can see how they were made.

Perhaps some of you will cry “Photoshop,” and perhaps the exposure or saturation were changed on a computer, or the photos were cropped, but I highly doubt that any of these are pure put-up jobs.

Go over to the site and see the rest.

This first one is the Grand Title Winner:

Mother’s Little Headful
One night, Udayan camped near a nesting colony of gharials on the banks of the Chambal River – two groups of them, each with more than 100 hatchlings. Before daybreak, he crept down and hid behind rocks beside the babies. ‘I could hear them making little grunting sounds,’ says Udayan. ‘Very soon a large female surfaced near the shore, checking on her charges. Some of the hatchlings swam to her and climbed onto her head. Perhaps it made them feel safe.’ It turned out that she was the chief female of the group, looking after all the hatchlings. Photo: Udayan Rao Pawar (India)

Freeze Frame
Etienne spotted this stoat, in its full winter colours, crossing a lane close to his home in Switzerland. It went into a snow-covered field at high speed and started jumping back and forth, presumably looking for signs of mice or rabbits. Etienne lay down in the snow and waited for it to reappear. When the stoat burst back into view about 10 metres away, Etienne had his camera ready. ‘The stoat didn’t seem to be spooked by me and continued jumping around,’ he says. ‘But it was a miracle that I managed to catch it in the air, at its highest point, and that I got it all in the frame, and in focus, too. I never expected to come home with such a picture.’Photo: Etienne Francey (Switzerland)

I love this photo because it’s so incredibly menacing:

The Water Bear
The fact that most images of polar bears show them on land or ice says more about the practical difficulties faced by humans than it does about the bears’ behaviour. With adaptations such as thick blubber and nostrils that close, polar bears are, in fact, highly aquatic, and they spend most of their time hunting seals on sea ice and are capable of swimming for hours at a time. Paul took his Zodiac boat to Hudson Bay, Canada, in midsummer to rectify this bias. He scouted for three days before he spotted a bear, this young female, on sea ice some 30 miles offshore. ‘I approached her very, very slowly,’ he says, ‘and then drifted. It was a cat-and-mouse game.’ When the bear slipped into the water, he just waited. ‘There was just a flat, world of water and ice and this polar bear swimming lazily around me. I could hear her slow, regular breathing as she watched me below the surface or the exhalation as she surfaced, increasingly curious. It was very special.’ Photo: Paul Souders (USA)

And of course there must be a Wol:

The Flight Path
Connor’s photography draws on the wilderness skills he acquired over a childhood spent largely outdoors. This female barred owl had a territory near his home in Burnaby, British Columbia. He watched her for some time, familiarising himself with her flight paths until he knew her well enough to set up the shot. ‘I wanted to include the western red cedar and the sword ferns so typical of this Pacific coastal rainforest.’ Setting up his camera near one of the owl’s favourite perches, linked to a remote and three off-camera flashes, diffused and on low settings, he put a dead mouse on a platform above the camera and waited for the swoop that he knew would come. ‘She grabbed the mouse, flew back to her perch and began calling to her mate. It is one of the most exciting calls to hear in the wild.’ Photo: Connor Stefanison (Canada)

This is a wonderful, almost abstract picture of a hot spring in Yellowstone:

“Reflection” pictures are all too common, but some of them, like this one, are splendid:

Hot-Spring Magic
Hot springs bubble up through the limestone that was once an ancient inland sea, building a series of shallow, white travertine terraces in the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. Cyanobacteria living in the geothermal water tint the travertine in shades of brown, red-orange and green. It was cold on the morning that Connor visited, and thick steam swirled around the dead trees, with their bases engulfed by travertine and snow on their windward sides. Using a long exposure, Connor caught the scene’s mystical atmosphere. Photo: Connor Stefanison (Canada)

Fish-eye View
Miniature, underwater landscapes fascinate Theo, particularly ones in fast-flowing streams and brooks. On the day he took this picture, he was experimenting with the effects under a small waterfall in a brook near his home in the Netherlands. Kneeling in waders and holding his camera under water, he shot looking up through the effervescent surface below the fall, using the bubbles to frame the scene of autumn trees. ‘I love taking pictures that show a fresh perspective on nature,’ says Theo. His biggest challenges were not being able to look through the viewfinder to see what he was doing and avoiding having his head appear in the wide angle of the frame. Photo: Theo Bosboom (The Netherlands)

And this is one of my favorites, if not the favorite. It’s a backlit whale shark (Rhincodon typus)—the world’s largest fish. It can grow larger than 14 meters (46 feet):

Giant with Sunbeams
Alex took this shot in open water in the Caribbean Sea, off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, while swimming among a huge aggregation of whale sharks. The sharks were feasting on millions of tuna eggs. One picture he had decided on was a back-lit silhouette that would show the bow waves generated by these enormous animals – the world’s biggest fish – as they push through the water, scooping up food in their giant mouths. When he spotted the fin of an approaching shark with the sun behind it, he dived down, held his breath and waited for the eight-meter animal to pass overhead so he could shoot it back-lit, with the sunbeams spearing into the water along its flanks. ‘As serene as the moment looks,’ says Alex, ‘I was bursting for air. The combination of excitement and awe didn’t help, or the fact that I had five meters of water and a shark between me and the surface. But the result was definitely worth it.’ Photo: Alexander Mustard (United Kingdom)

h/t: Grania