LONDON — The finalists are in for this year's Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, and the judges had a record pile to sort through: more than 10,000 entries, the most in the contest's history, submitted by photographers documenting the moments nature usually keeps to itself.
The shortlist, published this week, leans heavily on animals caught mid-indignity. In "Elvis," photographer Paolo Torre captured a caiman in Brazil surfacing with a mat of floating vegetation draped over its head at an angle that suggests a 1950s pompadour. In "The Different One," Dirk Koster photographed a young giraffe whose crown of leafy branches happened to align perfectly with its head, giving the impression of a particularly unconvincing toupee.
Other finalists favor slapstick over styling. Eigel B Jensen's photo from Costa Rica shows an anhinga that has successfully speared a fish on its beak but not yet worked out how to actually eat it, caught mid-struggle with its catch. In Fabi Fregonesi's "Did I Sleep Past My Alarm?", a fish wedged into a rock crevice wears what can only be described as a look of panic. And in "Out Of Water," Thong Duy Vu photographed a sunbird bathing in a water-filled banana blossom petal, leaving and returning each time to find its tiny tub had run dry.
As IFLScience catalogued the field this week, the throughline across the finalists is less about rare or dramatic wildlife than about ordinary animal behavior caught at exactly the wrong, or right, instant.
The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards were founded a decade ago with a deliberately modest mission: use humor to get people to pay attention to conservation, on the theory that a laugh travels further online than another grim statistic. Finalists are drawn from amateur and professional photographers worldwide, and this year's jump in entries suggests the format's appeal is still growing rather than fading into internet-meme fatigue.
An overall winner will be announced December 8 in London, with the top images exhibited at Gallery@Oxo the following week. A separate People's Choice vote opened this week and runs into next spring, carrying a smaller prize but, organizers note, a popularity contest that has occasionally favored a different photo than the judges' pick.
