The top wildlife photographers of 2018 have been crowned, with South Africa's Skye Meaker taking top honors in the youth category. Meaker tells DW of how he got his start — and of the challenges of working with leopards.
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Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2018 winners
From icebergs to insects and hummingbirds to flying fish, the Wildlife Photographers of the Year captured marvelous moments of nature around the world. Their work highlights how precious wildlife is, say judges.
Image: Marsel van Oosten, The Netherlands
The golden couple
The 2018 Grand Title Winner shows male and female Qinling golden snub-nosed monkeys watching intently as an altercation takes place down the valley between males of two other groups. It was spring in the temperate forest of China's Qinling Mountains — the only place where these endangered monkeys live.
Image: Marsel van Oosten, The Netherlands
Dream duel
As storm clouds gathered over Belgium's Ardennes forest, the sound of two red deer stags — roaring in competition over females — echoed through the trees. Well matched, neither challenger was giving way, and the contest escalated into a noisy clash of antlers. At last, the stags appeared on the ridge in silhouette, antlers locked.
Image: Michel d’Oultremont, Belgium
Lounging leopard
Skye Meaker captured Mathoja, a leopard dozing on the branch of a nyala tree. Mathoja's home is Botswana's Mashatu Game Reserve. In Bantu, Mathoja means "the one that walks with a limp." Skye calls her this because she limps from an injury she suffered as a cub. Mathoja is an otherwise healthy 8-year-old.
Image: Skye Meaker, South Africa
Duck of dreams
On the Varanger Peninsula, on the northern coast of the Barents Sea in Norway, this young photographer captured a quiet moment with a long-tailed duck. Getting close enough to snap the ducks meant an early-morning boat ride. Still bitterly cold in March, eider ducks and long-tailed ducks flew into the harbor as the morning light broke.
Image: Carlos Perez Naval, Spain
Pipe owls
Huddled together at the opening of an old waste-pipe, two spotted owlets look into this young photographer's lens. He and his dad spotted the owls when driving in Kapurthala, a city in the Indian state of Punjab. The owlet — less than 20 centimeters (8 inches) tall — popped its head out, followed by the larger female. This image shows a species that has adapted to urban life.
Image: Arshdeep Singh, India
Bed of seals
Crabeater seals rest on an ice floe in the Errera Channel at the tip of Antarctica. This seal species is considered to be relatively abundant, and there is no evidence they're in decline. Regardless, they are dependent on sea ice — in short supply in the Antarctic summer — for resting, breeding and avoiding predators. Their name is a misnomer as the seals feed almost exclusively on krill.
Image: Cristobal Serrano, Spain
Mud-rolling mud-dauber
The water hole at Walyormouring Nature Reserve in Western Australia buzzed in the summer heat. These industrious female slender mud-dauber wasps were busy digging egg chambers for their nearby nests. The wasps provision each of the dozen or more cocoon-like nest chambers with the paralyzed bodies of orb‑weaver spiders for their newly hatched larva to eat.
Image: Georgina Steytler, Australia
Blood thirsty
When seeds and insects dry up on Wolf Island in the Galapagos, sharp-beaked ground finches become vampires. Their sitting targets are Nazca boobies, which thrive here. Finches have a tougher time. Pecking at the booby's feathers with their beaks, they drink blood to survive. Rather than expose eggs and chicks, boobies tolerate it. The blood loss doesn't seem to cause permanent harm.
Image: Thomas P Peschak, Germany/South Africa
Kuhirwa mourns her baby
This female mountain gorilla in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest wouldn't give up on her dead baby. Weeks later, she ate what was left of the corpse. Her reactions to bereavement echo responses to death in other species. Elephants stroke the bones of dead family members and dolphins try to keep dead companions afloat. There is evidence that many animals behave in ways that reflects grief.
Image: Ricardo Núñez Montero
Hell-bent
A northern water snake is clamped tightly in the jaws of this hungry hellbender. In Tennessee's Tellico River, North America's largest aquatic salamander, the hellbender, has declined significantly because habitat degradation. Its presence indicates a healthy freshwater ecosystem. The snake eventually escaped the hellbender's bite.
Image: David Herasimtschuk, USA
The sad clown
Timbul, a young long-tailed macaque, instinctively puts his hand to his face to try to relieve the discomfort from his mask. His owner is training him for a street show. When he's not training or performing, Timbul lives chained up next to a railway track in Surabaya, on the Indonesian island of Java. Animal-welfare charities work to reduce the suffering of these monkeys.
Image: Joan de la Malla, Spain
Desert relic
A welwitschia reaches for the sky over the Namib Desert. With a slow growth rate and the largest specimens spanning more than 8 meters (26 feet), these desert survivors can live for more than a 1,000 years. Endemic to Namibia and Angola, welwitschia endure harsh, arid conditions, usually within 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the coast, so they can capture moisture from sea fog.
Image: Jen Guyton by Germany/USA
Night flight
Off Florida's Palm Beach, this photographer captured a flying fish at night. By day, these fish are nearly impossible to approach. Although, they are prey for many animals, they have the ability to sprint away from danger, rapidly beating their unevenly forked tails to build enough speed to soar up and out of the water. Spreading their pointed pectoral fins, they can glide for hundreds of meters.
Image: Michael Patrick O’Neill, USA
Mother defender
A large Alchisme treehopper guards her nymphs as they feed on a nightshade plant in El Jardin de los Suenos reserve in Ecuador. She lays her eggs on a nightshade leaf and shields them. Once the eggs hatch, they develop through five stages and she watches over them for the duration, wielding spines at any attackers she senses or is alerted to by her nymphs' vibrations or pheromones.
Image: Javier Aznar González de Rueda, Spain
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Slipping and sliding through the steep slopes and lush undergrowth in central China, waiting for hours for the ideal lighting conditions and a chance gust of wind in Botswana — the 2018 winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition went to great lengths to capture the perfect shot.
This year's grand prizewinner is Dutch photographer Marsel van Oosten, who snapped an incredible shot of two golden snub-nosed monkeys in the temperate forest of China's Qinling Mountains, their only habitat (see gallery above). Roz Kidman Cox, chair of the judging panel, called it a "symbolic reminder of the beauty of nature and how impoverished we are becoming as nature is diminished."
Youth category winner, 16-year-old Skye Meaker (pictured left), captured his winning close-up portrait of a female leopard dozing in the branches of a nyala tree at a Botswana game reserve after searching for the feline for hours.
Once he tracked her down, it was a test of patience as he waited for the wind, the light and the leopard to cooperate.
"She would sleep for a couple of minutes. Then look around briefly. Then fall back to sleep," recalled Meaker. All the while, he found the best position just a few meters away and composed the shot, trying different settings until the moment was right.
"With precisely executed timing and composition, we get a coveted glimpse into the inner world of one of the most frequently photographed, yet rarely truly seen, animals," said competition judge and award-winning photographer Alexander Badyaev of Meaker's image.
Meaker, who has ambitions to become a professional nature photographer, has been following the leopard, known as Mathoja, with his camera for the past seven years — ever since she was a cub. He and his family have developed a relationship Mathoja, they say, and regularly visit the reserve hoping to catch a glimpse.
Starting October 19, the general public will have the chance to discover these award-winning photographs and 98 other entries at London's Natural History Museum. The international competition, in its 54th year, attracted more than 45,000 professional and amateur entries from 95 countries.
Ahead of the exhibition, Meaker — a finalist in the competition in 2014 — answered a few questions for DW from his home in Durban, South Africa.
DW: You began taking photos at an early age, and say that you "instantly fell in love with wildlife photography." Do you remember your first images?
Skye Meaker: I started taking photos when I was 7-years-old with a disposable camera — taking pictures of everything and anything. My parents were always in love with the bush, so that's what sparked my passion for wildlife. My dad always had his camera with him, so that's how I fell in love with the photography side of nature.
I remember my first picture was of a male impala doing nothing. It wasn't a good shot, as it was blurry and I composed it poorly, but from then on I fell in love with wildlife photography.
Your winning photo, a portrait of a dozing leopard in the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana, captured a member of this vulnerable species in an intimate moment. Had you photographed Mathoja before? How challenging was it to track her and get the perfect shot?
Since seeing my first leopard, I became obsessed with the things; it was something about how elusive and mysterious they were, not to mention how beautiful. My winning picture is of a female leopard named Mathoja, which means "one with a limp." The guides and those that visit Mashatu Game Reserve frequently call her 'Limpy.' She got this name from falling out of a tree as a cub, which damaged her hind leg, making it difficult for her to climb trees.
I've been taking photos of this leopard since she was just older than a cub, and had the opportunity to grow as a photographer and watch her grow to having her own cub over the past seven years. That has allowed me to get quite close to this leopard in particular.
It took us a couple of hours to find her and to position myself to take this photo, and in this time I was constantly trying different settings while she was asleep. The hardest part about taking this image was how I had to wait for the wind to blow a branch just above her face to let in the light I wanted, and at the same time have her open her eyes.
In your time taking wildlife photos, have you begun noticing any effects of climate change, in South Africa or other areas?
[Over the last 10 years,] I've definitely noticed it in the places I visit regularly, like Mashatu, where the drought season is becoming longer, and how the rainy season is coming at irregular times every year.
What have been some of your most memorable photo expeditions?
My most memorable trip was to the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, which is an extinct volcano. A place I really want to go at the moment is India.
What do you hope people take away from your images?
The goal of my photography is to show how beautiful our natural world is, and how [we can] protect it, as well as to inspire other young photographers. But my next [immediate] goal is to win the Rising Star Portfolio Award in the same competition, and to improve my photography to the point when I can win the overall grand title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
I will always do photography and be involved with wildlife, as it is my passion.
The top 100 best images of the 2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition are on display at the Natural History Museum in London until summer 2019. The exhibition will also go on tour across the United Kingdom and to countries including Canada, Spain, the United States, Australia and Germany.