People's Choice Award

A polar bear carves out a bed from a small iceberg before drifting off to sleep in the far north, off Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

A snowshoe hare pulls its feet to its head to make the next big hop across snow in the Rocky Mountain National Park, USA.

Two courting mountain hares come together to touch noses in the Monadhliath Mountains in Scotland, UK.

The rarest species of wild dog in the world, the Ethiopian wolf, takes a rest among the highland vegetation of the Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia.

A grizzly bear glances towards the photographer before returning to fish for salmon in the Chilko River in British Columbia, Canada.

A humpback whale calf misses some of its mother’s milk, which drifts and swirls in the currents off the coast of Rurutu, French Polynesia.

A mudskipper fiercely defends its territory from a trespassing crab in Roebuck Bay, Australia.

A pygmy round-eared bat returns to its home as two others look out from the entrance in the lowland forests of Costa Rica.

Moon jellyfish swarm in the cool autumnal waters of a fjord outside Tromsø in northern Norway, illuminated under the aurora borealis.

A gelada suckles its baby alongside a companion at the edge of the plateau in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia.

A barn swallow flies over a meadow of cornflowers catching insects during springtime in eastern Germany.

An Adélie penguin (right) tries to interfere with an emperor penguin chick’s feeding time in Antarctica’s Atka Bay.

Standing on a rock in the Judean Foothills of Israel, a red fox cub locks eyes with the shrew it had, moments earlier, thrown up in the air.

A young red fox takes advantage of a bin stacked high with rubbish on a street in London, UK, before collection day.

A mesmerising mass of starlings swirl into the shape of a giant bird on their way to communal roosts above the city of Rome, Italy.

Bulrushes and quaking aspens are framed in a small corner of the Cabriel river in the Sierra de Albarracín mountains, Spain.

Near Montpellier, France, a cuckoo wasp tries to enter a mason wasp’s clay nest by softening it with drops of water. A smaller cuckoo wasp cleans its wings just below.

En wood duck and its brood are caught in a late spring snowstorm in Smiggin Holes, New South Wales, Australia.

A Balkan pond turtle shares a moment of peaceful coexistence with a northern banded groundling dragonfly in Israel’s Jezreel Valley.

Under the watchful eye of its mother in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park, a curious lion cub walks towards the photographer, watching from a vehicle.

A pair of lionesses devotedly groom one of the pride’s five cubs in Kenya’s Maasai Mara.

A bull elephant kicks over garbage, scavenging for rotten vegetables and fruit at a dump in Tissamaharama, Sri Lanka.

A Celebes crested macaque investigates the contents of a collected plastic bottle, ready for recycling at the edge of Tangkoko Batuangus Nature Reserve, Indonesia.

A rescued chimpanzee looks on from its enclosure at the Chimpanzee Conservation Center in the Republic of Guinea.

Confiscated coats, made from the skins of some of the most endangered big cats, are held by customs officers from across Europe.