Tiger Hugging Hidden Camera Wins Wildlife Photography Award

To photograph one of the rarest creatures on Earth, you have to be incredibly skilled and very lucky.

But Sergey Gorshkov is clearly both, as evidenced by his stunning image of a Siberian or Amur tiger deep in the forests of Russia’s Far East.

The image just earned him the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

The female tiger is seen hugging a tree, rubbing against the bark to leave her scent and mark territory in Leopard National Park.

“The lighting, the colors, the texture, it’s like an oil painting,” says WPY Chair of Judges Roz Kidman-Cox.

“It is almost as if the tiger is part of the forest. Its tail is mixed with the roots of the tree. The two are one,” he told BBC News.

The most extraordinary thing is that it is a camera trap image. The equipment was installed in the forest and left for months, waiting for it to fire automatically when a tiger passed by.

Of course, Sergey had to know where he was most likely to frame the animal, and that’s where the skill of an experienced wildlife photographer comes in.

Eastern Russian tigers were hunted to near extinction and are probably only a few hundred individuals now. And with their prey, mainly deer and wild boar, also diminished, it means that the Amur must travel great distances to find food.

It all adds to the difficulty of securing any type of image, no matter one that looks as impressive as this one. But consider this: the camera trap that took the winning photo was left in the field for 10 months before its memory card with its precious image file was recovered.

Sergey’s grand prize was announced by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge and television presenters Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin during an online event hosted by the Natural History Museum, London.

The NHM runs the WPY competition, which is now 56 years old.

This image of a young fox consuming a barnacle earned Finnish teenager Liina not just a win in the 15-17 year old category, but the overall grand prize for young photographers. The fox had gotten into a crevice to try to prevent his brothers from eating.

“The judges particularly liked it because only a really enthusiastic young naturalist could have gotten such a picture,” explained Roz Kidmand-Cox. “The composition is wonderful. Liina must have been lying on the ground because she is face to face with that young fox.”

A young male proboscis monkey in profile. He’s the winner of WPY Animal Portraits this year. The photo was taken at the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary in Sabah, Borneo. That splendid nose will get even bigger as the young primate matures. It will give your calls a louder sound and will probably come to signal your status in the group.

WPY isn’t just about animals. This image taken on the north side of the most active volcano in Europe won the Earth Environment category. Luciano Gaudenzio had to brave the heat and smelly steam to get closer to his subject. He described the scene as hypnotic, the vent resembling “an open wound in the rough, wrinkled skin of a huge dinosaur.”

This spider-eating glass frog is the winner in the WPY category for Behavior: Amphibians and Reptiles. Jaime took this photo in Ecuador’s Manduriacu Reserve, during a torrential downpour. He had to hold an umbrella and a flash in one hand while handling the camera with the other.

A specially built ultra-fast shutter system was needed to frame and freeze these two wasps in Normandy in northern France. The red-banded sand wasp (left) and the cuckoo wasp are about to enter the nests next door. Frank Deschandol wins the Behavior: Invertebrates category.

The winner of the underwater category for 2020. This is a small diamondback squid. It is a paralarva, which means it is beyond a calf, but it is not a subadult. Songda made a night dive off the coast of Anilao, Philippines. The animal is about 6-7 cm long.

These are the young Pallas cats, or manuls, found in the remote steppes of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in northwestern China. Shanyuan captured this image of the playful kittens after six years of tracking and studying the animals. The image wins the category Behavior: Mammals.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards are normally presented during a gala dinner at the NHM in South Kensington. But, as with so many events in the Covid era, the organizers had no choice but to go virtual this time. However, the popular exhibition will continue as normal. It opens on Fridays, but it is only entrance. The reserve is essential.

Entries for next year’s awards begin being accepted on Monday.

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