The 2021 BigPicture Natural World Photography Contest Reveals The Best Shots Of Mother Nature (30 Pics)

‍As the disappearance of sea ice due to climate change becomes more evident, polar bears are rapidly losing their habitat. At dusk, this lucky male settled down on a small iceberg—a refuge for the night.

An Arabian red fox cub emerging from its den sniffed a shrew out of the sand and began playing with it. For a brief moment, the hapless shrew appeared to be asking the fox to spare its life.

The European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) is rare, elusive, and difficult to photograph. After studying the area for several months, the photographer caught this image with a homemade DSLR camera trap, built in his photo studio in the forest.

Iconic Australia is captured in this particular moment as a resilient kangaroo pauses in a burned eucalyptus plantation. Nearly three billion animals perished or were displaced in the cataclysmic Australian bushfires of 2019 and 2020. This eastern grey kangaroo and her joey represent the lucky survivors, escaping from an area that had been transformed by humans for farming and then devastated by fire.

This spirit bear, one of only a few hundred white bears in this subspecies of black bears in the coastal rainforests of British Columbia, is known by the name “Boss.” After lowering his head into the river in search of salmon roe, he pulled his head up and shook, droplets spiraling around his head, looked at the photographer for a split second, and then plunged back into the water for his meal.

Getting to the other side of a vehicular road is a challenge, especially for a slow-moving sloth. Due to speed up is the movement to create arboreal bridges for animal crossings in biodiversity hotspots like Osa. Here, amidst stormy conditions, this beautiful moss-covered, three-toed sloth survived.

This mushroom, illuminated by a simple flashlight, was one of many fungi growing around the photographer’s house in the countryside. During the monsoon season, the mushrooms released thick, yellow-brown spores throughout the day for almost a month—a common but often ignored phenomenon.

Drawn to the fjord in search of herring that shelter from the open ocean each winter, this curious but protective orca mother allowed the photographer to swim nearby during the single hour that the sun shines through the fjord and into the water in mid-November.

The photographer swam with this battery of barracuda in the Blue Corner for four days, looking for the perfect angle. At the end of a 50-minute dive on his fifth day, the fish allowed him to swim among them as part of the school and he captured this fisheye view. On the sixth day, he joined the fish without his camera.

The young gentoo penguin jumped into the lagoon to play during low tide, and was ambushed by the leopard seal, which had been lying in wait.

A pod of sperm whales tolerated the photographer’s proximity long enough for him to catch one of the mothers nursing her baby, almost at the water’s surface. Not so easy to hold your breath and drink at the same time—for the baby whale, that is.

Ten years ago, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck the Pacific coast and triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The photographer took this photo in Fukushima Prefecture, an inland area now covered with virgin forest.

After six days of shooting, the photographer caught a speckled hummingbird balancing on the beak of a sword-billed hummingbird—a behavior that he had not previously seen in ten years of observing hummingbirds. This stunning feat was his most extraordinary photographic moment.

A fox kit at its den in downtown Whitehorse, surrounded by other playful fox kits, photographed using a flash and patience. Urban foxes often den in fenced off areas, where they can quickly escape from coyotes and dogs.

This unusual perspective of a barrel jellyfish—looking up through the tentacles and into the mouth, may be as close as we get to the fish-eye view as it is about to be eaten.

Eight Rothschild giraffes were marooned as rising lake waters in Lake Baringo turned a rocky lava pinnacle into an island. During the ambitious rescue, the giraffes were hooded and transported on a makeshift raft across the lake to Ruko Community Conservancy. Saving the animals on an allegorical ark illustrates the extreme efforts required to keep endangered species alive.

A small grizzly who ventures out in the less ideal daytime (to avoid bigger bears) is rewarded with a freshly caught salmon.

After preening each other’s feathers, the ravens took turns inspecting every nook and cranny in each other’s beaks—talking to one another throughout the process. In three winters of observing the gift-sharing, grooming, and singing courtship behaviors of ravens on the mountain, the photographer had never witnessed anything like this.

What looked to be mountains from the ground turned out to be extinct volcanoes as captured by this drone shot taken on a cloudy day in June, at the time of the midnight sun. The unusual perspective of an inhospitable landscape stained by traces of iron oxide creates an otherworldly atmosphere.

The birth of dozens of lynx spiders is followed by two days of cannibalism until only one spider remains. This mesmerizing spectacle of the ultimate sibling rivalry can be observed annually in the mountains of Taiwan.

“Come hell or high water” is a common southeastern saying that implies perseverance in the face of difficulties. This mother raccoon appears to be rescuing her baby from a flooded nest after a heavy rain in late October, in one of the handful of remaining old growth swamps in the southeastern United States.

This herd of Asian elephants had just arrived from an adjoining national park. Demonstrating both their right of way and their social behavior, the elephants marched slowly in formation, creating a protective front row that kept the young ones safe in the middle.

This camera trap image caught three young barn owls as they practiced flying from the top of an ancient well—while their parents were out catching rodents.

After a light storm drew a swarm of jellyfish and released a sizable amount of litter into the port of Bacoli, this mauve stinger carried off a discarded plastic chocolate wrapper in its tentacles. These beautiful little jellyfish, which phosphoresce when disturbed, are much feared for their painful stings.

An ice bear known to the locals as “The Mayor”— because he is the dominant male in the area—uses a fallen tree to cross Klukshu Creek.

To document the first-ever tagging event of an Amazon River Dolphin, the photographer joined the scientific team on a weeklong pursuit. After six days in pouring rain, they found one—and en route to the veterinary station for tagging, a concerned team member soothes the dolphin.

These greater flamingos were photographed from a helicopter over Lake Magadi, a salt lake in the Great Rift Valley of southern Kenya whose mineral deposits reflect light in ever-changing patterns.

Light from the quickly setting sun highlights this cliff-dwelling baobab tree as shadows move up the valley. The waterfall is a surprising backdrop for this ancient tree, which has adapted to extremely arid conditions.

Snowflakes become comets flying through the air, and the dark trunks of birch trees sway lightly in the twilight of this painterly image. The enchanting illusion was achieved by combining an on-camera flash, high aperture, and intentional camera movement.

‍“The Mayor”—recognizable by his large size and unique blonde claws—finishes a salmon meal near the photographer’s remote camera.