After more than 22,000 images were submitted, the winners of the Bird Photographer of the Year 2021 contest were announced this week. We wrote about the grand-prize winner, a photo of a Greater Roadrunner stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and the youth winner here.
Below is a slideshow of the gold and silver winning images from the eight primary categories in the contest. Enjoy these incredible photographs!
FUNNEL
Kathryn Cooper, United Kingdom
Between November and March, tens of thousands of Common Starlings migrate to Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Potteric Carr Nature Reserve. My aim was to depict the fluid-like movement of a murmuration and capture its essence. I am interested in transient moments when chaos briefly changes to order – moments when thousands of individual bodies appear to move as one. Here, I’ve captured the flock’s swirls, twists and turns, forming shapes like funnels and tornadoes as the birds seek a suitable spot in which to land. Rather than using a typical long exposure, I adopted a technique whereby I merged aspects of consecutive images using my own coding.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV with Canon 24–105mm f/4 lens. Stacked and merged exposures.
Winning images from the Bird Photographer of the Year 2020 competition
