2024 National Wildlife Photo Contest: Bright Spots

They seized the moment, with memorable results. See winners of the 2024 National Wildlife Photo Contest.

• By Jennifer Wehunt
• Wildlife Photos
• Dec 11, 2024

SO MUCH OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS ABOUT WAITING FOR THE RIGHT MOMENT: a subtle shift in lighting, a gentle breeze, a serendipitous encounter. When those stars align, boom! The result is like a flashbulb. The photographer feels it, and so do we as viewers, even months or years later. It’s an instant jolt with longevity, a precise second that transcends time. Without further ado, we present the decisive winners of our 53rd annual photo contest, selected by our judges from more than 29,000 entries. And if these images—from a highly relatable set of owl siblings to a pair of interspecies paddlers crossing paths at sunset—leave you inspired, get your camera ready. The 2025 contest opens January 15.

See all of the 2024 winners below—and don’t miss our honorable mentions and your People’s Choice picks.

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GRAND PRIZE
Bo Pardau
 Kailua-Kona, Hawai‘i

Despite the challenges of focusing a camera lens underwater—at night, no less—“on a transparent piece of jelly,” Pardau photographed this Cystisoma, a 2-inch-long amphipod, in March 2024 about 3 miles off the Big Island. There, at what he calls “the home of blackwater diving,” he and others hover at depths of 10 to 80 feet to view nocturnal creatures that remain as much as 3,000 feet deeper during the day. The ocean at night makes for a discombobulating environment, “where your only ability to orient yourself is knowing your bubbles go up,” Pardau says.

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BABY ANIMALS
FIRST PLACE
Glenn Nelson
 Seattle, Washington

Nelson identifies with these juvenile barred owl siblings, declared invasive in the Pacific Northwest. A lifelong U.S. citizen born in Japan, “my community was forcibly removed from about the same habitat [as the owls] for merely resembling the enemy during World War II,” he says. Nelson sees the owls, photographed in July 2023, as “charismatic fauna that open people to relationships with other beings and nature.”

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BABY ANIMALS
SECOND PLACE
Randall Ball
 Maasai Mara, Kenya

A photography workshop instructor, Ball of Cypress, Texas, coaches his students to capture notable wildlife behavior. He scored his own memorable example in October 2022 when this lion cub returned for a second helping after its pride successfully hunted a buffalo in the Maasai Mara reserve. “Despite having already eaten, the cub couldn’t resist indulging in the delicious meal once more,” Ball says.

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BIRDS
FIRST PLACE
Joshua Galicki
 Claiborne, Maryland

Both Galicki and his subject, a great blue heron, were poised at the right place and the right time to preserve this moment of subtle beauty: Galicki from his kayak in a cove near his home on the Chesapeake Bay and the heron about to grasp a loblolly pine branch on shore. “The sun was setting, and a few last rays of light touched the heron at a fantastic angle,” he says of the July 2023 image.

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BIRDS
SECOND PLACE
Hira Punjabi
 Rajasthan, India

Punjabi of Thane, India, has visited Keoladeo National Park many times, often witnessing conflicts between monitor lizards—which feed on bird eggs and chicks—and the egg layers. In January 2024, he was ready with his camera when a dozen birds, including this rose-ringed parakeet, went on the attack. “The whole drama lasted an hour or so,” he says.

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LANDSCAPES & PLANTS
FIRST PLACE
Gary Grossman
 Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Grossman of Portland, Oregon, typically doesn’t plan his shoots beyond aiming for sunrise or sunset. “But on this occasion”—September 2023’s harvest moon, which doubled as a supermoon—“I knew where I wanted to be for the moonrise”: on the western shore of Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. The clouds “were pure serendipity,” he says.

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LANDSCAPES & PLANTS
SECOND PLACE
Nancy Hajjar
 Lone Pine, California

The “beautiful swirling orange lenticular cloud” captured by Hajjar of Funchal, Portugal, in April 2021 only looks otherworldly. Lenticular clouds—formed by air flowing over high mountain ranges, such as California’s eastern Sierra Nevada—are frequently compared to, and sometimes mistaken for, flying saucers.

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MAMMALS
FIRST PLACE
Rachael Innes
 San Pedro, California

“I was fortunate to be able to follow an urban fox family from the day the kits emerged until they left to start their own lives,” says Innes of Torrance, California. In this August 2023 photo, she captured two red fox kits—and their shadows—playing at an old coast guard station in San Pedro, near the foxes’ cliffside den.

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MAMMALS
SECOND PLACE
Donna Bourdon
 Maasai Mara, Kenya

Bourdon of Decatur, Tennessee, observed four days of wildlife river crossings in Kenya in September 2023, including a roughly 10,000-strong throng of wildebeests and zebras. “Once the first wildebeest made the leap of faith, the entire herd pushed forward, and there was no turning back,” she says. Above, a sole wildebeest faces her camera head-on, waiting its turn to ascend the far bank of the river, even as “the risk of being trampled and drowned is extremely high.”

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MOBILE
FIRST PLACE
Steffen Foerster
 Falkland Islands

When Foerster of Sunnyside, New York, saw a colony of king penguins about to pass him on a Falkland Islands beach in December 2023, he had professional camera equipment at his fingertips. And yet, he reached for his cell phone with its ultrawide lens “for a much more expansive scene”—a split-second decision that caught “an unforgettable experience.”

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MOBILE
SECOND PLACE
Nancy Romer
 Dania Beach, Florida

Romer walks the beach near her Florida home every day, picking up trash and swimming when conditions are right—and when Portuguese man o’ war, like the one she snapped in March 2023, aren’t washing up. “I have tangled with them before, and they always win,” says the elementary school science teacher, who aims to pass her love of the ocean on to her students.

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OTHER WILDLIFE
FIRST PLACE
Joe Lucas
 Waterton Canyon, Colorado

Lucas of Littleton, Colorado, went looking for the usual wildlife suspects—bighorn sheep, mule deer, black bears, elk—along the South Platte River in July 2018. Instead he found common water striders that “rarely stopped moving for any significant length of time,” he says. With a combination of persistence and luck, he caught not only the insects but “the happy benefit of a sunburst when they paused briefly at just the right angle.”

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OTHER WILDLIFE
SECOND PLACE
Rachel Stepien
 West Seneca, New York

“Because of the tall grass, spittlebugs are everywhere,” says Stepien, who keeps 90 percent of her New York backyard—a Certified Wildlife Habitat®—wild. This young specimen, photographed in May 2023, feeds on plant sap and created a spittle bubble out of its own secretions. “I am always on the ground exploring as a macro photographer, so I get to see them in all stages of life,” Stepien says.

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PEOPLE IN NATURE
FIRST PLACE
Renee Capozzola
 Mo‘orea, French Polynesia

Although Capozzola’s first instinct while photographing pink whiprays in French Polynesia was to wait for a passing paddler to clear her frame, she checked the urge. “This was a good decision,” says the resident of Palos Verdes Estates, California. “The paddleboarder portrays the peaceful coexistence of people and wildlife,” as captured at sunset in August 2020.

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PEOPLE IN NATURE
SECOND PLACE
Billy Weeks
 Norris Lake, Tennessee

Sometimes the sun provides ample natural light. But sometimes a photographer has to make do with much less illumination, as was the case for Weeks of Ringgold, Georgia, who shot this image lit only by headlamps. While families and naturalists searched for bats and insects during a June 2023 bioblitz on Norris Lake’s Loyston Point, Weeks snapped his photo “in the toughest of conditions.”

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YOUNG NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS
FIRST PLACE
Karsyn Sterns
 San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica

Talk about a story arc: Accompanied by her dad, 13-year-old Sterns traveled to Costa Rica in March 2023 from her home in Dumfries, Virginia, with the goal of observing the aptly named resplendent quetzal. “I was especially happy to have seen and photographed this bird,” she says. We say, mission accomplished.

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YOUNG NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS
SECOND PLACE
Edwin Liu
 Mississauga, Canada

A friend told the budding photographer Liu, 17, that a great blue heron fished every evening in a Mississauga park. When Liu visited in October 2023 but didn’t see the bird within an hour, he grew restless and abandoned the park pond, only to encounter the bird in the bordering farmland. Ten minutes later, he watched the heron catch a vole. “When the heron hunts, it is indeed more patient than the photographer,” Liu says.

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PORTFOLIO
FIRST PLACE
Sonny Parker
 Yukon, Canada

While Dall sheep—native to alpine pockets of northwestern North America, from Canada’s British Columbia, Northwest Territories and Yukon up into Alaska—have evolved to stave off a host of predators, they now face a different threat: a rapidly changing climate. In the past, events such as lambing were timed precisely to optimal conditions, but as seasons become less predictable, “the sheep are struggling to stay synchronized,” says Parker, who lives in Haines Junction, Canada. In photos from May 2021 to January 2024, Parker documented the sheep throughout the year, including during winter, when the animals’ dense fur keeps them warm in temperatures as frigid as 40 below zero degrees F.