BBC Wildlife Camera-trap Photo of the Year 2011 winners
.jpg "Animal Portraits winner: Florida panther by Roy McBride and Rebecca Sensor, USA - © Roy McBride and Rebecca Sensor")
%20copy.jpg "Animal Portraits commended: Brown bear by Melanie Clapham - © Melanie Clapham")
%20copy.jpg "Animal Portraits commended: Male and female Florida panthers courting by Roy T. McBride - © Roy T. McBride")
About the Camera-trap competition
From a daring jackal punching above its weight to mischievous monkeys and rare panthers, here are the images that came out top in the second BBC Wildlife camera-trap photo competition.
Camera-traps empower researchers to spy on some of our rarest or most secretive species, gaining extraordinary insights that would have been impossible even just a few years ago.
Judging the hundreds of entries this year was, once again, as difficult as it was enjoyable. The competition’s five judges Mark Carwardine, Richard Edwards, Dan Freeman, Charlie Hamilton James and our own Sophie Stafford spent hours looking through them, giving particular weight to the contribution that each image makes to scientific knowledge.
This stunning image of a fearless black-backed jackal running rings round a male lion taken by Ken Stratford of the Ongava Research Centre in Namibia, emerged as a worthy Overall and Animal Behaviour Category Winner, securing a prize of £3,000.
Celebrating and rewarding conservation initiatives is at the heart of this competition’s ethos; the prizes – courtesy of the World Land Trust and Páramo Directional Clothing Systems – go to the winning projects, not the individual photographers.
To see the Editor's favourite shots from the rest of the entries, click here (coming soon).
And to see why the daring jackal attacked the big lion - and what happened next - click here.