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See the Hilarious Animal Shenanigans Captured in Photos and Videos Shortlisted for the 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards
From a sneezing moose to a real-life angry bird, this year’s competition received a whopping more than 10,000 entries from 112 countries
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It’s that time of year again. The beloved Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the 2026 finalists, and the competition couldn’t be fiercer. The contest received more than 10,000 photos—a record for the awards—from 112 countries, and the images show all sorts of shenanigans, from a bird wearing a flower hat to a family of meerkats preparing for a photoshoot.
Judges including photographers, media presenters and comedians narrowed the entries down to just a few picks for each of the four categories. The shortlist includes 40 individual finalists, three finalists under 16 years old, four portfolio finalists and nine video finalists. All will be showcased from December 9 to 13 at Gallery@Oxo in London.
“What began as a small effort to raise awareness of wildlife conservation has grown into something far bigger than we ever imagined. The competition is now truly global, and a decade or so on, we want to make it even bigger, funnier and more far-reaching than ever,” Tom Sullam, a photographer and co-founder of the competition, says in a statement. “We use humor to get people to feel empathy towards wildlife, and it’s that empathy that creates behavioral change for the better.”
Each year, the competition supports a different conservation organization, and this time around it’s the Born Free Foundation, which protects global wildlife and their natural habitats from exploitation.
The judging panel will examine the finalists’ entries over the next few weeks, and the overall winner, category winners and highly commended winners will be announced on December 8. The top prize is a safari with Alex Walker’s Serian in Kenya’s Masai Mara reserve, described as a “photographer’s paradise,” and other prizes include Nikon cameras and photography gear.
Here are some of our favorite entries on the shortlist.
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Heather Cudworth’s Lessons features two elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park during a four-year drought. The older elephant is giving the younger elephant a dust bath, a practice that provides the animals with protection from the sun and soothes their skin. But the dust went right into the tiny elephant’s face.
“She pulled her trunk back as if she was winding up for a strike-out pitch, then proceeded to shower her youngster with presumably the most high-pressure dust bath he’d ever experienced, directly to the face!” Cudworth explains in the photo’s description. “Whether she was teaching him a lesson in cleaning his skin, keeping his mouth shut, or both, I don’t know. However, I am certain she got her point across. Listen to your mother, little one.”
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The photographer of this eye-catching image, Phiané Oosthuizen, is in the under 16 category. The up-and-coming artist was at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, South Africa, when they snapped this shot of a colorful southern double-collared sunbird, which had just been feeding from a flower.
“He pushed his beak deep into the flower to reach the nectar, and when he pulled away, the petal came with him. For a moment, it looked as though he had suddenly put on an enormous beak and was playing dress-up! It was such a funny and unexpected little moment that I was so grateful to have captured it,” Oosthuizen writes.
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In Little Godzilla, Udo Harms captures a reddish squirrel with a giant mouthful of grass in Hanover, Germany. The little guy indeed looks like a small, furry monster, though you could also interpret the creature as a guilty thief caught red-handed.
“This squirrel had taken a bit too much in its mouth,” Harms writes. “But with a few firm bites, the greenery was made to fit.”
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Are You Kidding Me? shows another squirrel up to no good—specifically, launching itself at a disbelieving great horned owl. Photographer Kevin Lohman captured this hilarious moment in Santa Cruz, California. After he first spotted the young owl in the tree, it moved to another branch, creating a photogenic scene that Lohman was keen to capture. But after he raised his camera, the owl suddenly found itself under furry attack.
It had “barely settled onto its perch before a protective squirrel launched a surprise aerial tackle, knocking it into the grass below. The most unbelievable part? The squirrel repeated the stunt two more times,” Lohman explains. “The owl and squirrel were shaken up but unharmed.”
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Eagles are widely considered to be majestic animals, but the white-tailed eagle strutting across Tapani Linnanmäki’s image really drives the message home. Linnanmäki has been photographing the species on Finland’s western coast for four winters and suspects this particular individual may have been featured in the 2024 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards in an entry titled Shake, Ruffle, Rattle and Roll.
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Photographer Subi Sridharan captured this image in Namibia, where he spotted three meerkats in a hilariously familiar pose. “One meerkat insists on giving a last-minute grooming inspection while the others are trying their best to look respectable,” Sridharan writes.
Did you know? Don’t be fooled by their cute demeanor
Meerkats are highly social animals that live in matriarchal societies. The highest-ranking female produces around 80 percent of the group’s pups, and she sometimes even murders other pups to ensure her offspring get all the resources.
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Jan Wittmer’s Angry Bird is a blast from the recent past—the early 2010s—featuring a seriously disgruntled-looking goldcrest on the island of Helgoland, Germany. Goldcrests are some of the smallest birds in Europe and weigh around 0.2 ounces. When Wittmer captured this photograph, it was the first time he’d seen one.
“To get a perspective at eye level, I placed my camera on the ground. My heart was pounding, and my finger was glued to the shutter as the tiny bird darted back and forth every second,” Wittmer recalls. “Suddenly, it came to a complete stop and looked straight into the camera. That was the exact moment this photo was taken.”
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The relaxed atmosphere in Eric Boren’s If I were just a little faster… betrays a more difficult relationship between polar bears and birds. He explains that the Arctic giants eat bird eggs, and this individual must have gotten too close to an ivory gull nest. The photographer witnessed several of the avians bravely harassing the predator in Svalbard, Norway.
“At one point, the bear lay down and the gull landed nearby, allowing me to capture this photo of the two seeming to contemplate each other,” Boren writes.
Deepak Jaybhaye’s video features three bonnet macaques during a monsoon in August 2021. The photographer saw two of the monkeys sitting on a roadside parapet and wanted to get a shot. But he didn’t have time to set up his professional camera, so he rolled down the window and started filming with his phone.
“I was already recording when, quite suddenly, a third monkey rushed into the frame and tried to squeeze into the space occupied by the other two. The timing and the way the newcomer appeared made the whole situation look as if he was asking, ‘Can he sit here?’” Jaybhaye writes. “It was such a spontaneous and hilarious moment that I was very fortunate to have my phone recording at exactly the right time.”
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This last but certainly not least entry is a finalist in the portfolio category. Alexander Hormann’s Sneeze shows a moose in Maligne Lake in Alberta, Canada, going through a hilarious and familiar experience. The large animal, which had swum across the lake, clearly had a case of the sniffles that morning in August 2025.
“The moose seemed to be going through a strangely human sequence of events: First it appeared to have a runny nose, then seemed to sneeze, before finishing with what looked remarkably like a big, happy grin,” Hormann explains. “It wasn’t until I went through the entire sequence carefully on my computer that I discovered the little story hidden in the images—a miniature comic strip with a tragic beginning, a relieving sneeze in the middle, and a happy ending.”
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