The marmot looks paralyzed by fear, its fingers splayed and mouth agape. The fox is poised to pounce. It’s a freeze-frame of chaos, impulse, and terror—nature at its essence.
For his remarkable memorialization of the moment before attack, Chinese photographer Yongqing Bao has won Wildlife Photographer of the Year, awarded today by London’s Natural History Museum.
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start reconsidering their relationship with the animals surrounding them,” Doest says. His story will publish in National Geographic
magazine in early 2020. (Learn how to photograph wildlife ethically.)
For his image of a puma attempting to take down a guanaco, from the December 2018 story on the Patagonian predators, Ingo Arndt
shared the top award in the “mammal behavior” category with Yongqing Bao. Taken in his seventh month tracking pumas on foot, the
image “was the key picture for the story,” Arndt says. Although guanacos are the main prey for pumas, no one had photographed this
essential hunt in detail before, he notes. The guanaco, three times heavier than the female puma, managed to escape.
National Geographic’s final honor went to Charlie Hamilton James, who won the urban wildlife category for his intimate photograph
of rats on the prowl in New York City at night.
“People now call me the rat guy,” says Hamilton James, who says he’d previously been called “the otter guy” for his camera trap
images of otters in Yellowstone, “which is much nicer.”
“They just do what rats do and live where rats live,” he says of his subjects. He followed the rodents into sewers and crevices over
months in the city. “It was amazing to see how they had just fit into the cracks of New York so brilliantly,” says Hamilton James, who
says he loved shooting New York at night.
“After a while working with them I started to respect them,” he says. “I’d never say I love them, but I do quite like them.”
Editor's note: This story was updated on October 17 to clarify the marmot's fate.
Natasha Daly is a writer and editor at National Geographic, where she covers animal welfare, exploitation, and
conservation. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
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