Bird Photographer of the Year (BPOTY) is a competition that has been around since 2016; its eponymous British sponsor works with a partner charity, Birds on the Brink, to provide “vital funding for grassroots conservation efforts worldwide,” in the words of its director, Will Nicholls.
For the 2024 competition year, 23,000 images were submitted from around the world, in various categories. The winning photos are now collected in Bird Photographer of the Year, a book published by Princeton University Press. You will, when you open the book and start looking at the images, laugh at many of them, most of them, with utter delight. They’re that good.
Of course one would expect the winning photos to be gorgeous, and they sure are, like this European Goldfinch, an entry from France’s Nicolas Groffal:
Hundreds of shots were required before he took this perfect one, Groffal says, and many of the other images in the book are accompanied by notes to similar effect, describing the ordeals often necessary to obtain the desired image. According to the BPOTY website, the cash prizes for the competition are nothing to sneeze at (with, for next year’s 2025 contest, the Grand Prize winner getting £3,000, and lesser but still substantial amounts for gold, silver, and bronze award winners, and others) but these photogs work hard for the money. The aptly-named Tomáš Grim’s one-paragraph description of the circumstances in which he took this photo of Hooded Crows (Berlin; January; dark from sunrise to sunset; shivering): “The dark scene coupled with mostly cold tones perfectly captured my feelings” tells it all:
As noted, this book’s photos are all, in their ways, gorgeous, but there are lots of books these days with gorgeous photos of birds. What makes this one different, and a bit special, is that the BPOTY contest is judged in categories: Conservation, Best Portrait, Black and White, Birds in Flight, Bird Behavior, Black and White, Urban Birds, Comedy Bird Photo, Birds in the Environment — with, as well, three other categories of “Special Awards”: Portfolio Award Winner, Conservation Documentary Award Winner, and Young Photographer of the Year. So the settings and “takes” — the stagings, so to speak — are often unexpected; the categories seem to allow the photographers to exercise a creativity that might otherwise take a back seat to other considerations, as in this portrait of Mute Swans in Britain by Samuel Stone, a “Silver” award winner in the Best Portrait category:
and these two, both winners in — what else? — the Comedy Bird category. 
(At left, Helmetshrikes in South Africa “like a set of clothes pegs on a washing line,” photo by Gary Collyer of the United Kingdon; at right, an Adelie penguin acts “as if performing a modern dance move,” photo by Nadia Haq of the United States.)
And then there is the Conservation Gold Award Winner, taken by the Bird Photographer of the Year, Patricia Seaton Homonylo, of Toronto, Canada. Here is her photo, lovely in its way, with intriguing symmetry that makes the viewer immediately wonder: what is this?
. . . only to discover the horrid punchline, once the picture’s provenance is revealed: the photograph shows birds killed by collisions with windows. During spring and fall migrations there are 1.3 million such deaths in North America annually, according to the text. These were gathered by volunteers from the Flight Light Awareness Program and honored thusly, in an annual “Bird Layout.”
Anyone reading or writing this piece will likely not live to see a world without bird-killing windows (or bird-killing wind turbines) but there is, as always, hope for the next generation. The “Bird Layout” shown above starts this book; it ends with another tour de force, the Gold winner for the age 11-and-under category, taken by Germany’s Julian Mendla. It’s a Eurasian bittern,
. . . and the photograph is especially amazing because “the species is generally so wary and hard to observe,” as noted by Dr. Paul Sterry, one of the editors, and a trustee for the Birds on the Brink charity.
According to the BPOTY website, the deadline for entries for the 2025 BPOTY contest is 23:59 BST on the 8th December 2024.
You better get cracking!
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Bird Photographer of the Year. Collection 9. Forward by Simon King. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. September 24, 2024, 256 pp., US $35.00, UK £30.00. ISBN 978-0-691-26359-5
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