Spring break, Easter break, or any old excuse for a break-break: If you’re looking for a cheap ‘n’ easy get-away with plenty of “wow!” that will transport you round the world with only a quick (and beautiful) ferry ride to Vancouver Island, have I got the day trip for you.
Especially if you’ve got kids in tow. More especially if you love the natural world, and worry about what those same kids are going to inherit.
No airports. No hassles. No más problemas. All you have to do is soak up the remarkable 100 photos of wildlife—big and small; known and mysterious; threatened and abundant—selected for the famous (and prestigious) Wildlife Photographer of the Year, developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. This is the event’s 60th year, and the competition drew nearly 60,000 entries from 117 countries and territories around the world.
Lucky photographers all who made it to the touring exhibition now on at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. A surprising number are literally kids, but they obviously get what one of the judges, photonaturalist Tony Wu of Japan, offered as sage advice to wildlife photographers of any age: “Be patient. Meeting an animal is just like meeting a person. It takes time to get to know one another.”
Like Alberto Román Gómez of Spain, who took his powerful image from his dad’s car window: a delicate European stonechat perched next to a brutish chain. And Shreyovi Mehta, who ran back to her dad to grab a camera, then captured two Indian peafowl silhouetted under repeated archways of trees in the morning calm of India’s Keoladeo National Park. These are only two of the photographers, who handle their craft like masters—at 10 years of age, or younger!
But never mind the lucky fotogs, as we call them in the news biz. Really, it’s lucky us who live a hop and a skip from the Royal BC Museum—one of two venues on the exhibition tour in Canada. The other is the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and lord knows why you’d hop on a plane to go that far.
But before we get into more Canadian angles—including Shane Gross, who lives in Nanaimo and won the overall “grand-title award” for his unforgettable photo, The swarm of life, which features western toad tadpoles swimming through lily pads in a Vancouver Island lake—here’s a “museum” moment.
The Natural History Museum, London, is one of the best of its kind. Period. It’s the most visited in Europe, and has been a hit since opening in 1881. There’s the 80 million specimens in its collections—some of which were studied by the likes of Charles Darwin and Captain Cook. Plus the 300-plus scientists on staff who use their knowledge and the museum’s unique collections to tackle the biggest challenges facing the natural world today—climate; frightening extinction rates; how humans can and can’t co-exist with wildlife around the world.
Consider Shane’s western toad tadpoles, for one. If you’re a Whistler buff, you’ll know they’re near-threatened—disappearing from much of their historic range in B.C. due to highway mortality, clear-cut logging and climate change. You’ll also know that Whistler’s Lost Lake Park, which is annually closed to protect them, is the breeding ground for the largest local population. Imagine: The swarm of life happens there every spring!
Then there’s the entertainment side of natural history museums, like the tidal pools and giant mastodon at the Royal BC Museum. In London, the star is Dippy the diplodocus, an 85-foot replica of fossilized bones. More spring break fun: Check out David Attenborough’s ground-breaking Museum Alive documentary filmed there. Besides Sir David, it features Dippy and more—the extinct dodo bird; a giant sloth; a yeti—that all come “alive” via state-of-the-art CGI.
As for royal museums, like the five in Canada, the name is used for official museums in countries with a monarch, or which formerly had one. A nice distinction to support in these “special” times.
But back to that wonderful wildlife photography show—and the many Canadians featured. Nine in all, including Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas, 17, who won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year award with Life Under Dead Wood. Alexis, a Canadian citizen living in Germany, specializes in subjects “smaller than his thumbnail.” (See click-through, above.) The dead wood is a log he rolled over to shoot his eye-popping image of a wee springtail and a fruiting slime mould. (One of my favourite things! As per one of my earlier Pique columns.) Which just goes to show it’s worth paying attention to what’s right under our feet.
Another Canadian showstopper, one that vividly portrays our many environmental challenges: Patricia Homonylo’s gut-wrenching When worlds collide, featuring 3,900 birds that died after flying into windows in the Greater Toronto Area in a single year. (Also, see above.) Then, of course, there’s Shane’s striking image of beautiful western toad tadpoles, swim, swim, swimming up towards the light in an image that, once seen, you can’t shake from your mind. An image that sheds light on so many overlooked aspects of the natural world we dominate.
Shane, a marine conservation photojournalist who snorkelled the lake for hours to get his unique shot, is also one of 20 Canadians who started the Canadian Conservation Photography Collective. He loved photography before he started school, and I love what he noticed during the opening at the Royal BC Museum. We noticed it, too, on our visit: How people put their phones away. How they soaked up the images and the excellent little cutline stories beside each one. “It was inspiring,” he said. And it was.
I also like what he said in one of the videos about his own photo: “It gives me hope to know there are still places like this (pristine Cedar Lake) on the planet.” Indeed. And it takes great wildlife photographers like him to share those moments with the rest of us.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year is at Victoria’s Royal BC Museum until April 27. The museum cares for more than 7 million objects, belongings and specimens, and works to enhance our understanding of environmental changes to help with future decision-making.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who got her first camera at age nine.
