Wildlife Photo of the Year: Lynx at Play Wins the Nation’s Heart

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 is by Josef Stefan, and the photo is titled Flying Rodent. The title says it all. A small Iberian lynx bird, spotted in the warm light of a Spanish afternoon, stands upright on its hind legs and tosses a rat into the air with almost coordinated precision. Mice are hanging – briefly, perhaps – between paws and the world. Stefan, who spent three days hiding in the Torre de Juan Abad in Ciudad Real, central Spain, watched the scene for about twenty minutes before the lynx lost interest, grabbed its prey, and disappeared behind a bush. He said: “To me it was like a rat could fly.”

The photo has more weight than its dramatic status. The Iberian ibex was once among the world’s most endangered mammals. “At the beginning of the 2000s only about 100 people were left in the small areas of Spain,” says Natalie Cooper, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Only 62 of them were mature people. Habitat loss and human persecution – based on the mistaken belief that cats eat livestock – have played an important role. But their reliance on one type of prey has proven to be more vulnerable. “In fact, it mostly eats rabbits,” says Cooper, “and its population also suffered when a large disease outbreak wiped out rabbits in the 20th century.” Conservationists responded by restoring the habitat, wildlife corridors, and a captive breeding and rehabilitation program that trained the cubs to hunt and, most importantly, to avoid humans. Seven new colonies were subsequently established throughout Spain and Portugal. “This is a remarkable achievement that required collaboration among scientists, government agencies, private organizations and local communities,” Cooper says – “a real example of what we can do if we work together.” By 2022, the IUCN Red List had counted 648 species in the wild, a recovery measured in the thousands of percent over two decades.

Josef Stefan calls the lynx “a living symbol of hope,” and that sentiment is more than just sentimental. His three decades as a nature photographer have been spent, in part, representing this special animal. Lynx used to be difficult to photograph. That he could now spend three days in hiding and emerge with this image – a playful, carefree, independent little animal in its natural habitat – says something about what a collective effort can achieve.

One of the top, Beauty Against The Beast by Swiss photographer, Alexandre Brisson, offers a very different kind of beauty. At the Walvis Bay bird sanctuary in Namibia, a group of young flamingos gather in a narrow waterway flanked on both sides by tall electricity pylons. The sky above melts from deep blue to orange and rose blue. The two birds finally soar, their pink-tipped wings piercing the industrial geometry of the area. The image is shocking in its contradictions: the softness of the birds, the hardness of the infrastructure, the sky making its indifferent display behind them.

Christopher Paetkau’s Family Vacation it arrives from the opposite end of the emotional register. Shot somewhere along the coast of Hudson Bay, Canada, the image shows a mother polar bear lying on her side with three cubs pressing down on her, one on her side and one curled up on her back. The tundra below them is still decorated with summer wildflowers. It’s a simple image, although the context is enlightening: the sea ice is retreating, and because of the bears’ ability to hunt. These animals are resting between trips which are getting bigger and bigger every year.

On the island of Notsuke in Japan, Kohei Nagira took a picture of something completely unknown to him. The sika deer carries with it the distinctive skull of its rival—a remnant of a rut-season battle that ended badly for one of them. A local fisherman reported seeing the deer drag the carcass for days before the head was finally released. The deer lived one winter. Image of Nagira, named The Endless Warrendered against a flat white sky, the skull and horns fill the upper half of the frame in a manner that sounds more like a vanitas than a wildlife portrait.

Nima Sarikhani’s The Last Image it is the most quietly destructive of critically acclaimed films. A young bear walks on a Svalbard glacier with its mother—a close-up, almost soft shot that forces the animal into an uncomfortably direct gaze. A caption attached to the photo revealed that shortly after it was taken, people chased the couple away from nearby houses. The mother was later found dead. The child was shot after showing aggression. This is, possibly, the last photograph ever taken of them.

Elsewhere on the short list, Cecile Gabillon left Costa Rica to find herself in a large colony of spinner dolphins that coordinate their hunts, the animals twirling through the blue waters in seemingly artificial ways. Lalith Ekanayake caught a lion-tailed macaque at full speed in the Western Ghats of India, the baby clinging to its chest, the animal’s two eyes closed in front. Ponlawat Thaipinnarong records the moment a sarus crane turns to hold the beak of its week-old chick in the rice fields of Buri Ram, Thailand. Dustin Chen photographed a beautiful hummingbird at a lodge in northern Peru, its two thin tail feathers — each ending in a blue-green disc — torn as it fluttered through a cluster of purple flowers.

Chris Gug descended into the darkness of Indonesia’s Lembeh Strait at night and found a tiny crab swimming atop a shiny green jellyfish, its yellow body strikingly clear against the bioluminescent vessel beneath. No one knows whether a crocodile is walking, hiding or hunting. Joseph Ferraro’s bug nymph, electric yellow and speckled, sits motionless on the stem of a deep red Michigan plant, waiting with inexhaustible patience for something to wander into its venom.

The Photographer of the Year Exhibitionrun to Natural History Museum of Londonuntil July 12, 2026.