Unseen Moments: 76 Stunning Wildlife Photos That Captivated the NPOTY People’s Choice Over the Years

“Stratoni” is a small seaside village on the Halkidiki peninsula in northern Greece, which was abandoned many years ago by swimmers and most divers because of the gold mine on the edge of the Gulf. It is a place where I have regularly dived over the past 10 years to observe and photograph the local seahorse population (Hippocampus hippocampus, short-snouted seahorse) that lives in the small bay and is perhaps the only known colony of seahorses in Greece. You can meet them more easily in large numbers during the summer months if you dive to a depth of 8-17 meters. The area where they live is a large area consisting of sand without the presence of seagrass or rock formations. It looks like a large desert, and the only places that can be protected and support feeding are some carried materials such as leaves that end up in the sea from the nearby mountain, branches, and even litter.

However, for some reasons that have not yet been discovered, seahorses continue to live there and multiply at a steady rate. All this time in Stratoni, I have witnessed some amazing scenes with seahorses, watching them swimming, peacefully floating, achieving amazing camouflage, flirting, and mating. Over the years, the seahorse’s colony has survived enormous natural disasters, overfishing, waste thrown into the sea from the village pipelines, and interventions by the adjacent gold mine.

When you regularly dive at a point, you have the opportunity to observe the changes that occur at that point and how much the human presence affects the environment. The COVID-19 virus in 2020 and the mandatory use of plastic gloves, disposable masks, and sanitizers have led (and still lead) to an even greater contamination of the already polluted sea. It’s the promise of pollution to come if nothing is done. Unfortunately, the already burdened bay has to face another problem, the “Covid waste”.

The toughest photograph I took was when I witnessed an extraordinary hunting in the wild nature of the Okavango Delta in Botswana during the dry season in August. It started with dozens of powerful lions attacking buffaloes in the middle of the day. At this point, the scene was already a little difficult to capture, as the attack was very intense and the battle between the lions and the buffaloes was dramatic, with lots of blood and blood-curdling screams just before the kill!

But this is normal in nature, so this isn’t the reason why I say it was the toughest. The best part still had to come through. In the middle of the next night, the lions came under attack by almost 30 hyenas trying to steal the kill from them! It was a rare and cruel scene that I, the guide on the safari, and clients, of course, had never seen before. The ferocity, the sounds of terror coming from everywhere, and the intense darkness made the shots very tough to get.

The next morning, this large male lion returned and peered through the bones, creating this portrait. That was the moment I felt the power of the king in my heart!

I had travelled to Svalbard seven years previously, but wanted to return with better equipment and on a much smaller vessel, finally doing so last year.

We had enjoyed a few polar bear sightings, some at a considerable distance while exploring the archipelago, but on the penultimate day in the North of the islands, we came across this female who had located a Walrus carcass on the rocky shoreline. She had obviously been there with it for some time, by the size of her distended belly and the marks in the snow.

We then watched her repeat a cycle of sleeping in a snow hole she had dug above the shoreline, emerging to stretch, before then making her way down to eat her fill of the carcass. She would look up from time to time, with her head and chest smothered in blood. It was very difficult to find a clear angle and frame a composition, as the carcass was nestled amongst large rocks and the idling Zodiac was being tossed up and down in the offshore swell, often causing the images to be clipped, or have the horizon at very extreme angles. However, once repleat, she would briefly wade into the sea to wash the worst of the blood from her coat, before returning to the snow slopes above the carcass to snow bathe. Here she would snow plough, roll and toboggan, in order to return her coat to its pristine condition, which she could achieve surprisingly quickly. She would then return to her snow hole and sleep, repeating the process several hours later.

This snow bathing and later play presented the best opportunity to photograph her, but when we first found her the light was poor, and from our lower angle on the sea she was often partly obscured by the largest rocks. Returning later in the evening, we found her higher on the slopes, clear of all obstruction, just playing in the snow as she was already spotlessly clean. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, we watched as she snow ploughed, slid down the slopes, rolled, or just lay on her back chilling out in the sun before we left her to her evening, and this is when this image was taken.

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