[imagesource:’No Access’ by Ian Wood]

Calling all animal lovers: It’s time to have your say in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award.

With 25 heart-warming images on display, you’ll find everything from a honey badger with a face full of spiky porcupine quills to a beluga whale treating itself to a little exfoliation. Oh, and let’s not forget the scientist in Louisiana, camouflaged as a whooping crane—because why not?

This year’s competition, brought to you by the Natural History Museum in London, is nothing short of spectacular. To cast your vote for the most awe-inspiring shot, simply head over to their website. And while you’re at it, check out some of the incredible finalists below.

Starting with a bloodied yet determined honey badger returns to finish off a Cape porcupine, which earlier had tried to defend itself in Botswana.

A ghostly barn owl exits the hayloft window of a derelict barn to hunt in fields outside Vancouver, Canada.

A disguised biologist approaches an endangered whooping crane in Louisiana, USA.

Michael has been chronicling the lives of endangered whooping cranes since early 2019. The biologist acted with cat-like quickness to check the bird’s health and change a transmitter that was no longer working. The transmitter helps biologists track these non-migratory birds and learn more about them. This experimental population was reintroduced in Bayou Country in 2011. In the 1940s there were roughly 20 whooping cranes in the region. Since then, numbers have climbed to over 800.

Four grey wolves cross a minimalist landscape of naked aspens and snow in Yellowstone National Park, USA.

A young cheetah cub hisses while waiting to be sold in Ethiopia.

Captured from her home plains in the Somali Region, she was transported for several days on the back of a camel to the northern coast of Somaliland. Illegal wildlife trafficking is a problem in the Somali Region. Farmers catch and sell cheetah cubs to traffickers, claiming that the cheetahs attack their livestock. Sometimes the farmers and traffickers cannot sell the cubs immediately. The bigger the cheetahs get, the harder it is to find buyers. Some end up being killed and their parts sold, their bones shipped to Yemen and then to other Asian markets. They are then sold as tiger bones and used to make Chinese bone wine. After hissing at the camera, the cub started chirping, calling out for its mother.

A European roller defends its territory from a bemused-looking little owl in Kiskunság National Park, Hungary.

A dramatic blue-grey sky highlights the soft greys of a Weddell seal as it rests on an ice floe.

A collage of dead butterflies and moths trapped by the surface tension of the water floats in a stream in Italy.

Members of an Indian wolf pack pause briefly as they play in fields in Bhigwan, India.

A beluga whale rubs its underside on a shallow river bottom to exfoliate its skin.

Head over to the Natural History Museum website to catch them all and cast your vote.

[source:petapixel]