Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 winners announced, top prize goes to elephant study

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 is Federico Veronesi, who also won the Behaviour: Mammals category. He shot the scene in the Huab River Valley on a Nikon Z8 with a 400mm f/2.8 lens.

There is a twist. Veronesi first assumed the elephant was the calf’s mother. When he shared his photos with an elephant research project working in the area, researchers recognized her as a female who had lost a calf of her own several years earlier, and who had picked up dead calves belonging to other females before. So whose calf it was is not certain.

Kathy Moran, who chairs the jury, called the photo an emotional gut punch and said that, intellectually, it is proof that animals have cognition. Veronesi said that in 20 years of photographing animals, it was the most heart-wrenching and fascinating moment he had seen.

Asian and African elephants both show behavior around death, including calling out, standing guard over the body, touching and inspecting bones, and carrying the dead. Scientists do not agree on what it means. Some think it reflects an elephant coming to understand death. Others see it as a possible sign of grief.

The winning photo sits alongside another striking image from this year’s competition: a runner-up showing an orca repeatedly lifting a dead calf out of the water.

For the first time in the contest’s history, both the adult and the young overall winners were black-and-white photographs.

Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 is Oscar Whitfield, a British photographer who lives in Zimbabwe and entered the 11 to 14 category. His image, Labour of Love, shows a dung beetle straining to push its ball uphill through sand in Zambezi National Park. He lay flat in the dust to shoot it at eye level, using a fast shutter speed and high light sensitivity.

Other winners include:

• Amelie Davis (10 Years and Under), who froze a single wingbeat of a common carder bumblebee in her garden in Surrey, England, using her dad’s smartphone.
• Tony Wu (Underwater), with what the museum says is probably the first photo of Abbott’s moray eels courting, taken off southern Japan with dim red light to avoid disturbing them.
• Isak Pretorius (Behaviour: Birds), with two shoebill storks in a Ugandan swamp. Fewer than 5,300 mature shoebills are thought to survive in the wild.
• Sitaram Raul (Behaviour: Invertebrates), with a scorpion digging into the dunes of India’s Thar Desert to escape the heat.
• Michał Michalski (Natural Artistry), whose slow shutter turned a flock of goldfinches and bramblings into what looks like trees still covered in autumn leaves.

American photographers did well too. Loren Elliott won the Photojournalist Story Award for his series on the roughly 100 coyotes living in and around San Francisco, Anton Sorokin won Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles for a California newt laying eggs in a murky pond in Contra Costa County, and Alex Lindbloom took Oceans: The Bigger Picture with a whale shark inspecting a fishing platform’s catch in Indonesia.

Technique mattered as much as luck this year. James Lewin, who won Animals in their Environment with a young bull elephant spraying zebras at a Kenyan waterhole, used a camera converted to shoot infrared light, which tamed the usually harsh African light and produced a dreamy black-and-white scene.

Agorastos Papatsanis, winner of Plants and Fungi, used ultraviolet light on Mount Olympus in Greece to make the stems of beautiful bonnet mushrooms glow neon yellow. Kutub Uddin won the Portfolio Award for otherworldly close-ups of slime molds, and Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas the Rising Star Portfolio Award for tiny, overlooked animals. Both use focus stacking, a method that blends many shots focused at slightly different depths into one sharp image.

The lesson for anyone with a phone in their pocket: patience and getting low to your subject count for a lot. A garden bumblebee won a category.

The winning images are on display at the Natural History Museum in London from October 16, 2026, until July 11, 2027. Tickets start at £17 for adults, £13.60 for concessions and £8.50 for children, bought through the museum.

Alongside the photos, the exhibition uses the museum’s Biodiversity Intactness Index, which estimates how much of a region’s natural wildlife remains, to show how the habitats pictured are changing. If you can’t make it to London, the full gallery is on the museum’s website, and the companion book, Wildlife Photographer of the Year Portfolio 36, came out on October 14 for £28.