Software Engineer’s Bald Eagle Photo Wins NatGeo Photo Contest

“Dance of the Eagles” by Karthik Subramaniam. Grand Prize Winner.
A bald eagle arrives to steal a perch on a tree log that gives a strategic check out of the shoreline at the Chilkat Bald Eagle Protect in Alaska. When other eagles drag freshly caught salmon in from the h2o, these bystanders swoop in to take a share. “Hours of observing their styles and conduct helped me seize times like these,” states photographer Karthik Subramaniam, a software program engineer with a enthusiasm for wildlife pictures.

Rhez Solano, Honorable Point out
King penguins group together in the viewfinder of Rhez Solano on the shorelines of Gold Harbor in South Georgia. The island sits in the distant southern Atlantic Ocean, not much from Antarctica, and hosts some 25,000 breeding pairs of king penguins, together with gentoo penguins, and elephant seals.

Riten Dharia, Honorable Point out
In May perhaps 2021, the Fagradalsfjall volcano erupted in the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland for the very first time in more than six thousand a long time. The lava flow continued for 6 months, spreading really hard black rock throughout the landscape. It was, says Riten Dharia, who captured this graphic, “an exhibition of the uncooked and brilliant power of mother nature.”

Eric Esterle, Honorable Mention
Asiilbek, a nomadic Kazakh eagle hunter, preps his golden eagle, Burged, for a horseback hunt in the grasslands exterior of Bayan-Ölgii, the westernmost province of Mongolia. The eagle’s schooling starts when fledglings are captured from their cliff edge nests and taught how to hunt for hare, fox, and even deer. The custom stretches back 3,000 decades.
“For this picture, I was lying on my belly in the inclined place searching by way of the electronic viewfinder at the edge of the stream,” claims photographer Eric Esterle. “The ground shook as Asiilbek’s horse passed considerably less than a few feet away, splashing me with ice cold h2o. I remember covering my digicam with my body and putting my head down.”

Bruce Taubert, Honorable Mention
Wildlife biologist Bruce Taubert was learning the taking in habits of Arizona’s modest desert owls when he received blessed: he discovered a uncommon screech owl next. For numerous evenings, he photographed the owls carrying foodstuff again to their chicks applying an infrared excursion beam that triggers a superior-speed flash. This owl collected a Mediterranean gecko on its nightly run. “Mediterranean geckos are nonnative in Arizona and their distribution is expanding,” Taubert suggests. His concept on how they received there? “It might be that the geckos had been delivered to [nearby] homes by landscape corporations bringing in unique plants.”

W. Kent Williamson, Honorable Mention
Sometimes a sleepless night time is critical to great pictures. At approximately 3:40 a.m. on a frigid summertime early morning, photographer W. Kent Williamson snapped this impression from Tipsoo Lake in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington. From across the continue to drinking water, he could see a line of headlights as weary climbers approached the peak’s 14,411-foot summit—the culmination of a multi-day climb. “The night sky was unusually very clear, and the Milky Way could be viewed just higher than the mountain,” Williamson says. “I was amazed to see how vivid the climbers’ lanterns had been.”

An Li, Honorable Mention
Maras in Peru. The archaeological file demonstrates that salt extraction likely started below in advance of the Inca Empire, possibly as significantly back as 500 Advert. Nowadays that custom carries on with the households who own wells, each of which provides some 400 kilos of salt for every month. “The salt wells acquire water by means of channels sourced by a salty underground spring close by and after the water evaporates, the crystallized salt continues to be,” claims An Li, who captured this photograph. “Here, a salt miner is making use of a wood rake to extract the salt.”

Alex Berger, Honorable Point out
On a highway journey by the Austrian Alps, Alex Berger noticed a just one-lane road that wound into the mountains and looped again on the map. He adopted it alongside a tiny stream lined with walls of forest when he spotted this golden tree blooming from involving the trunks. There is “a fantasy-ish encouraged dimension for me,” claims Berger, “which offers me goosebumps.”