Six Wintry Wildlife Images to Celebrate the Season

The weather is getting colder and the snow is falling, so cozy up with a hot drink and enjoy this sample of winter wildlife photography that reveals how beautiful the animals and landscapes are around the world during the winter season.

Flying with the geese

It was a small, quiet drone that finally made it possible for the photographer to fly with wild geese. These were truly wild – not habituated to humans, as in other flight shots – just some of the thousands of pink-footed geese that migrate north over the photographer'shome by Norway's Trondheim Fjord. The geese stop off here to rest and feed, and the photographer's vision was to show their morning departure, with the snow-covered landscape laid out below. It required a clear day in April and perfect timing. The drone had to be in the air in the right spot and height before the geese got there so as not to spook them. At a respectful distance and using a wide-angle lens, he created a picture that, for Nordic people, is resonant with symbolism.

Testing the Depth

Storm clouds create the grey palate of this cold Greenland landscape – a region visited by comparatively few wildlife photographers. Casting ripples on the meltwater on a windless evening, the Arctic fox is delicately testing the water's depth as it makes its way across the ice to a nesting tern colony on an offshare island beach. It's spring, and the fox is moulting into its summer coat, but a shortage of lemmings has meant that it emerged from the starvation of winter to lean times and was more intent on hunting for chicks than paying attention to human followers.

Arctic exposure

The visual effect of the river of freeze-weathered rock scree moves from a pattern of emerging dark rocks to a foreground of almost 2D white shapes. It's a landscape image created by a Nordic photographer familiar with the nature of the High-Arctic Norwegian island of Svalbard and in love with the compsitions to be found in such dramatic wildernesses. He knows that, in April, such a south-facing slope is a prime location for Svalbard rock ptarmigans because it's where the snow and ice melt fastest and expose the tundra vegetation. The rock ptarmigans are still in their pristine white winter plumage, and the effect of counter-illumination – the brightness of their plumage matching that of the snow – camouflages them among the rocks. Using an ultra-wide, ultra-sharp zoom on a low tripod, the photographer has crawled close enough to a couple of resting males – feeling safe in their disguise – to include the white balls of plumage merging into the snow-patchwork landscape.

House of bears

It's a mysterious image, almost post-apocalyptic, but one that tells a true story. The bears – some 30 of them – have invaded a remote island in the Russian Far East. They were forced to do so by the retreat of the sea ice in summer and with it the loss of their main food – seals, out on the ice. On the island they have found an abandoned weather station and have been searching the houses for food. Here they are looking out into the mist, having heard a strange noise – the low buzz of a drone, flown from the photographer's boat sheltering in the bay below. It was an extraordinary situation but also an exceptionally difficult image to create, requiring skill as much as luck.

Head to head

Fresh snow is both stage and backdrop for the power struggle. Stress is in the rolling eyes, effort in the panting, status in the size of the locked, equally matched antlers. It's October, the start of the rut of the Svalbard reindeer – a small race, now in thick, white winter coats, adapted to withstand the High-Arctic climate of the Svalbard archipelago. The photographer was following one bull and his small harem of females, waiting and watching for such a moment. To frame the essential elements – the intensity of the pushing, forelegs braced – while avoiding the players, he used a telephoto. The harem owner (right) won after 15 minutes, finally twisting his fatigued opponent off-balance. But the image immortalized the beautiful symmetry of the two powerful Arctic survivors.

Read more in 60 Years of Wildlife Photographer of the Year, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from 60 Years of Wildlife Photographer of the Year: How Wildlife Photography Became Art by © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London, 2024; Photography © the individual photographers