It takes a pretty sound effort to land the 2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, and a certain Tim Laman hasn’t let the team down.

The biologist titled his picture ‘Entwined Lives’, and is understandably pleased with his efforts.

Along with the acclaim, the winning entrants in each category will go on display in London’s Natural History Museum.

These below come from the museum’s official site (HERE):

Grand Prize:

High in the canopy, a young male orang-utan returns to feast on a crop of figs. Tim [Laman] knew he would be back. After three days of climbing up and down himself, he hid several GoPro cameras in the canopy, triggering them remotely from the forest floor when he saw the orang-utan climbing.

Young Photographer Of The Year:

Catching sight of a crow in the park, Gideon [Knight] thought the spindly twigs of the sycamore tree ‘made it feel almost supernatural, like something out of a fairy-tale’. But the bird kept moving, making it difficult to keep it silhouetted against the Moon. Finally, just as the light was failing, Gideon turned an ordinary moment into something magical.

Birds:

The parakeets were not impressed. They had returned to their nest to find a Bengal monitor lizard had settled in. The birds immediately set about trying to evict the squatter: biting and hanging off its tail. This went on for two days, giving Ganesh [H Shankar] several chances to capture the fast-moving action.

Mammals:

‘I wanted to depict the darker reality of the well-known wildebeest migration,’ says Simon [Stafford]. Returning after a stampede at first light he saw this pack of spotted hyenas gorging on the lifeless trampled bodies of those that didn’t survive. As one hyena momentarily broke from the feast, it gazed across in Simon’s direction.

This one is truly heartbreaking, the winning entry in the Single Image category:

Nothing prepared Paul [Hilton] for what he saw, or smelled. Some 4,000 defrosting pangolins hidden in a shipping container behind a façade of frozen fish. This was one of the largest seizures of the animals on record. ‘Wildlife crime is big business,’ says Paul. ‘It will stop only when the demand stops.’

Pangolins are the world’s most trafficked animal, with all eight species targeted. Pangolin meat is eaten to demonstrate status and their scales are wrongly believed to treat a variety of ailments. These dead pangolins pictured were probably destined for China and Vietnam for the exotic meat trade or for use in traditional medicine.

Sorry I know things got heavy there, so maybe check out some of our top local photographers for relief (HERE).

I’ll end with a few of the entrants into the The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Below from VICE:

But don’t forget the pangolins, that struggle is real.

If you’re thinking some of these might look good blown up on canvas and hung on your wall speak to our friends at ATB Photo, who are offering our readers 15% off each purchase. Enter the code 2ov15 at checkout and boom, job done.

Also I’m outta here for a while, see y’all in November. Play nice.

[sources:nhm&vice]