Image of mournful elephant mom wins 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year

An Italian photographer's "heartbreakingly poignant" photo of a mother elephant carrying her dead calf has won this year's top Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. See a selection of the other winning photos here.

Youth award goes to photo of hard-working dung beetle

Emily Chung · CBC News

· Posted: Oct 14, 2026 1:54 PM EDT | Last Updated: 10 minutes ago

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(Federico Veronesi/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

An Italian photographer's "heartbreakingly poignant" photo of a mother elephant carrying her dead calf has won this year's top Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

Federico Veronesi captured "The Aftermath" while tracking elephants in the Huab River Valley in Namibia. He noticed unusual drag marks in the sand of the dry riverbed. When he caught up to a family of elephants, he saw an adult female with a calf's leg wedged between her tusk and trunk.

Kathy Moran, chair of the jury for the 2026 competition, described the photo as working on "so many levels."

"Emotionally it's a gut punch, heartbreakingly poignant. Intellectually, it's proof that animals have cognition," she wrote in a news release announcing the winners.

In addition to winning the grand prize, the photo also won the Behaviour: Mammals category.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the U.K.-based Natural History Museum in London, with a stated goal to share nature's stories and insights about environmental challenges that need our attention.

This year, the annual competition — the 62nd edition — attracted 65,403 entries from 121 countries and territories.

It awards top prizes to both an adult photographer and a young photographer under 18.

This year's Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year prize was won by Oscar Whitfield, a young British photographer who grew up in Zimbabwe and frequently returns there during school holidays.

His photo, captured while lying on the ground, shows a close-up of a dung beetle hard at work pushing a ball of dung. It was also the winner in the 11 to 14 years age bracket.

(Oscar Whitfield/Wildlife Photographer of the year)

Officially, there were no Canadian category winners this year. However, Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas, who lives in Germany and won this year's Rising Star Award, is a Canadian citizen who has previously told CBC News his parents were both born in Canada, and he has relatives in Ottawa and Nova Scotia.

His featured photo, "Afternoon snack," is a close-up of a robber fly preying on a flesh fly. "The bubbles forming in the victim's eyes indicate that the robber fly has injected digestive enzymes that liquefy its internal tissues before they are sucked out," the photo's description reads.

(Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Canadians can see the 100-photo exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto from Nov 7, 2026, to Feb 28, 2027, or at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria from Feb. 12, 2027, until April 18, 2027.

It opens at the Natural History Museum in London this Friday.

Here are some of the other category winners.

Amelie Davis, of the U.K., won the 10 years and under bracket with this photo of a common carder bee in southern England, captured with her father's smartphone.

(Amelie Davis/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

A California newt lays eggs while clasping vegetation that already contains another newt's egg clutch in the winner of the Amphibians and Reptiles category, captured by U.S. photographer Anton Sorokin. The newt will stay like this until the egg mass swells to a size too large to be eaten by a predator.

(Anton Sorokin/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Greek photographer Agorastos Papatsanis used UV light to make these fluorescent bonnet mushrooms glow brightly on a decaying log on the lower slopes of Greece's Mount Olympus. The image won the Plants and Fungi category.

(Agorastos Papatsanis/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

A young bull elephant sprays water on a group of zebras at a waterhole in the Chyulu Hills of Kenya in this photo, the winner of the Animals in their Environment category, captured by James Lewin using a camera converted to infrared to soften harsh lighting.