20 November 2024: Wildlife Photographer of the Year
My wife and I spent today at the Natural History Museum, primarily to visit the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibion.
The judges had chosen 100 photographs to display, split among various categories. They also chose a winner for each category and two overall winners, one taken by an adult and one taken by a younger person. I don’t think I agreed with the judges over the winner in any category. I guess that was because I selected the photographs I liked best as pictures while they were looking at a range of factors.
The photograph that had most impact on me was in the category depicting the effects of humanity on wildlife. It showed a shark with its tail caught in a discarded net. My favourite photograph was of a fox in the snow, getting ready to pounce on a mouse. You could see the way its ears, eyes and nose were all focused on its prey. My second favourite was the runner-up in the section for photographers aged 10 and under. It was a shot of two peafowl standing back to back, framed by forest trees with a deer looking on. It could have been painted.
It took us three hours to look at the photographs and vote for the “People’s Choice” among the 25 photographs which had not made it into the main exhibition but had been selected by the judges for this purpose. After eating a snack in the Museum’s Court Restaurant, we spent the rest of out time there in the special exhibition on birds.
This traced the history of birds from their origins as dinosaurs. They still share dinosaur characteristics, such as being warm blooded, laying eggs and having feathers. I’m pretty sure that as science advances we will realise that dinosaurs were multi-hued rather than the grey shown in most depictions.
Apparently some birds are as intelligent as the great apes. Their brains may be much smaller but they are also much more tightly packed. Some birds are tool-users.
The exhibition ends with a very optimistic impression of the dawn chorus as it will be in 2050 if humanity takes all the right steps.