The 2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition is now on at the Natural History Museum in London:- it is both beautiful and thought provoking.

 

There are no happy endings in nature as we have seen this week in David Attenborough’s new nature series, Dynasties. Lions are poisoned and left to die.  We are left in tears.

I am reminded how precious nature is as I wander round this year’s (2018) Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, presently on display at the Natural History Museum in London. How utterly amazing it is, from the symbiotic relationship between a tiny treehopper and an ant, right up to a vampire bird on a remote Galapagos island that survives lean times by drinking the blood of large seabirds.

Marvel at the portfolio from Michel d’Oultremont, a stunning array of light and shadow and sheer determination in the pursuit of photographic perfection. Some of the images on show literally took years to set up.

It is the first time I have noticed pictures taken by drone, a glimpse of the future. Other glimpses are mass extinctions of mayflies, so confused by artificial light that they mistake roads for rivers and lay their larvae where they will never survive; the sun bear in his cage, farmed for his gall bladder bile and an emaciated dead tiger which chewed a foot off to escape a poachers trap but subsequently could not fend for itself.

 

 

Look in the eye of the drowsy leopard by Skye Meaker (Winner of the Young Category) and you cannot fail to feel that the world would be diminished by its extinction. The overall winner is The Golden Couple by Marsel van Oosten of the Netherlands (feature image) showing gloriously coloured Qinling golden snub nosed monkeys in China, precariously endangered in one of the world’s worst offending countries against animals.

The quality of the photography is superb, the animals, fish and insects a joy to the eye. If you care anything for nature, visit this exhibition. Enjoy the spectacle but also ask yourself what the world would be like without such species. It is to its credit that this exhibition raises such questions.

The following quote by John Donne (Meditation XVII – Meditation 17) could equally apply to animals and nature.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

 

Wildlife Photographer of the Year,  Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, Kensington, London SW7 5BD. Entrance £13.50. On show until 30th June, 2019.