An emotional scene of an elephant carrying a deceased calf has earned Italian photographer Federico Veronesi the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026.

While tracking elephants in Namibia’s Huab River Valley, Veronesi spotted an unusual trail of drag marks across the sand of a dry riverbed.

Following the tracks, he came across a female elephant carrying a dead calf, its leg wedged between her tusk and trunk.

Initially, Veronesi assumed the elephant was the calf’s mother. But after sharing his photographs with an elephant research project working in the area, he learned that this wasn’t certain.

Researchers recognised the elephant as a female who had lost a calf several years earlier and said she had previously picked up dead calves belonging to other females.

For Veronesi, the encounter was deeply significant. “Of all the 20 years I’ve done photographing animals, this is the most heart-wrecking and fascinating and dramatic,” he said, describing it as “revealing of the depth and complexity of the emotions, the feelings of the animals.”

He hopes the image will encourage people to look beyond animals’ physical appearance and recognise them as individuals with their own relationships, memories and emotions. “It’s a small window that opens just a crack into the complexity of their world,” he said.

The competition’s annual exhibition, external opens at the Natural History Museum on Friday 16 October 2026. Keep scrolling to see more award-winning images.

Category: Young Grand Title and 11 to 14 Years

Photographer: Oscar Whitfield, Zimbabwe/UK

Location: Zambezi National Park, Zimbabwe

Only by lying in the dust and capturing the beetle at eye level could Whitfield show how much strength its task required.

While on a family game drive in Zimbabwe, near his home in Victoria Falls, he spotted the dung beetle struggling to push a ball of dung uphill through the sand, with a trail of flies following closely behind. After experimenting with different angles and compositions, he captured a moment that reveals the extraordinary effort involved in this seemingly simple task.

“I hope that when people look at the photograph, they can see too, and maybe appreciate how much can be happening in a small moment in the natural world,” says Whitfield.

Category: 10 Years and Under

Photographer: Amelie Davis, UK

Location: Surrey, England

You do not need a camera or a plane ticket to take an award-winning photo. Davis captured this shot in the garden using her dad’s smartphone.

The image freezes in time a single wingbeat from a common carder bumblebee as it prepares to land on a flower.

Category: Animals in their Environment

Photographer: James Lewin, UK

Location: Chyulu Hills National Park, Kenya

Lewin captured this dreamy, black-and-white photo of a young bull elephant spraying zebras at a waterhole.

He softened the usually harsh light by using a camera converted to infrared.

Category: Animal Portraits

Photographer: Aaron Sanders, UK

Location: Porthkerris Beach, Cornwall

Common octopuses are usually found in the warmer Mediterranean Sea. But with global warming pushing up springtime sea temperatures, sightings across south-west England have massively increased.

Sanders described the moment he spotted a single eye peeking from behind the kelp: “We remained perfectly still, watching one another with a seemingly shared curiosity.”

Category: Birds

Photographer: Isak Pretorius, South Africa

Location: Mabamba Swamp, Uganda

Fewer than 5,300 mature shoebill storks are estimated to remain in the wild. Yet Pretorius, while canoeing with a guide, was able to capture these two – likely a breeding pair collecting material for their nest.

Despite their name, shoebill storks are actually more closely related to pelicans, herons and ibises.

Category: 15-17 Years

Photographer: Konrad Gräeter, Germany

Location: Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Spring sees male blackbirds search for high vantage points to sing and try to attract a mate.

This photo was taken in a vineyard at dawn, when the birds sing their most complex compositions.

Category: Urban Wildlife

Photographer: Seth Forestson, UK

Location: Lumphini Park, Bangkok, Thailand

Forestson lowered himself onto the mud to capture this common water lizard against the city skyline.

These adaptable lizards live in cities across South and South East Asia and will take whatever food is available, such as catfish and koi.

Category: Under Water

Photographer: Tony Wu, USA/Japan

Location: Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyūshū, Japan

This is probably the first time the courtship ritual of Abbott’s moray eels has been photographed, the NHM said.

Wu worked with biologists and used dim red light and a customised fisheye lens to minimise disturbance.

Category: Photojournalist Story Award

Photographer: Loren Elliott, USA

Location: USA

San Francisco is estimated to be home to around 100 coyotes, living alongside a large human population. While they can prey on domestic animals, they also help control disease-carrying rodents, and residents’ attitudes towards them are mixed.

Category: Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles

Photographer: Anton Sorokin, US

Location: Contra Costa County, California, USA

Sorokin dipped his camera and lights in a murky pond to catch this glimpse of a California newt laying her eggs.

Category: Behaviour: Invertebrates

Photographer: Sitaram Raul, India

Location: Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India

A scorpion is photographed burrowing into the shifting dunes of India’s Thar Desert.

Exploring the dunes at night, Raul saw many scorpions searching for prey but as temperatures rose after sunrise, the scorpion dug into the sand to escape the intense heat.

Category: Oceans: The Bigger Picture

Photographer: Alex Lindbloom, USA

Location: Off Cenderawasih Bay, Papua, Indonesia

A whale shark investigates the catch of a mobile net-fishing platform, known as a bagan. Lindbloom searched for sharks around dawn, using the bagan’s bright lights to illuminate them when there was too little natural light for his drone.

Category: Plants and Fungi

Photographer: Agorastos Papatsanis, Greece

Location: Litochoro, Pieria, Greece

Papatsanis used ultrviolet light to illuminate mushrooms known as “beautiful bonnets” growing from a decaying log on the lower slopes of Mount Olympus in Greece.

Category: Rising Star Award

Photographer: Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas, Germany

Location: Germany and Northern Ireland, UK

Tinker-Tsavalas uses macro photography to reveal the intricate details of tiny animals that are easily overlooked, particularly in urban habitats. His interest in macro photography developed during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when he was restricted to habitats close to his home in Berlin.

Category: Natural Artistry

Photographer: Michał Michalski, Poland

Location: Litochoro, Pieria, Greece

Michalski used a slow shutter speed to photograph birds flying across a background of leafless birch trees. A field of unharvested sunflowers had attracted mixed flocks of birds, especially goldfinches and bramblings, before they were startled into the air by a sparrowhawk.

Category: Wetlands: The Bigger Picture

Photographer: Alex Visbal, Colombia

Location: Stansbury Bay, Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA

Visbal documents how a single engineered line can reshape an entire wetland as part of a long-term project on the industrial impact on waterways. The pink comes from microbes thriving in extremely salty water after the area was cut off from fresh water.

Category: Photojournalism

Photographer: Francisco Negroni, Chile

Location: Route 40, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina

Negroni records this scene of a dead puma displayed as a hunting trophy in Santa Cruz, a province in Argentine Patagonia. Although Santa Cruz banned puma hunting in 2025, illegal persecution continues.

Category: Portfolio Award

Photographer: Kutub Uddin, Bangladesh/UK

Location: West Sussex, England, UK

Uddin’s photographs explore the miniature world of slime moulds, organisms that can be barely visible to the naked eye and whose fruiting structures are just one to two millimetres high.