For bird-loving photographers, the National Audubon Society’s annual photo competition is something of a holy grail. This month, the organization named six among the 6,000+ photos—submitted by the more than 1,800 photographers from across North America who entered the 11th Audubon Photography Awards—as winners and four as honorable mentions.

According to Audubon, the judges sought images evoking the ingenuity, resilience, and beauty of birds small and large, terrestrial and aquatic, across four divisions: Professional, Amateur, Youth, and Plants for Birds. The winning photos will be featured in future issues of Audubon and Nature’s Best Photography magazines. Notably, this year’s top three victors are all women—perhaps signaling a sea change in the historically male-dominated field of wildlife photography. 

This was the sixth year that Gail Bisson, winner in the Amateur category, threw her hat in the ring. “I’ve had images in the top 100 but never managed to crack the top tier,” says Bisson, a retired physician based in Nova Scotia. Ironically, the winnings from her playful portrait of a bare-throated tiger heron, shot with a handheld Canon immediately after a rainstorm in Costa Rica’s Tárcoles River, technically bumped Bisson out of amateur territory—between this prize and winning the inaugural Kingbirder Contest earlier this year (with a shot of a female merganser) she’s already earned enough to be considered a professional photographer. It’s certainly an unexpected turn of events for Bisson, who says ornithology was the class in which she struggled most in college. “I got into photography when my children were small, and for a milestone birthday, I got myself a 35mm camera for an African safari, intending to capture elephants and lions,” she says. “But when I got there, it was the birds that most caught my attention. I’ve been shooting them every since.” 

This was the first year that grand-prize winner Joanna Lentini, a New York–based writer, photographer, and scuba diver, entered the contest. Her photo—depicting a cormorant diving for its sardine dinner, shot from beneath the waves of the Sea of Cortez near La Paz, Mexico—was the sole shot she entered. Lentini, who has since written an Audubon magazine guide to snapping photos of birds from underwater, was diving in La Paz's sea lion rookery when she encountered the cormorants plunging beak-first into the sea. “I shifted my focus from the playful sea lions and ended up feeling really bad for the birds—they needed to eat, but the playful sea lion pups kept zipping by the hunting birds and nipping at them from behind,” says Lentini, who captured her winning photo using a Canon 70 Mark II inside a Nauticam. 

The 2020 contest marks the second year Audubon named a winner in the Plants for Birds prize category, which highlights the essential role of native plants and the natural habitat and food sources they provide for birds, as well as the Fisher Prize. Named after former creative director of Audubon Kevin Fisher, this prize recognizes originality and technical expertise.

Since the pandemic struck, both the National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology have reported increases in birding app downloads as well as upticks in traffic to bird cams, citizen-science species-reporting sites, and web pages of, in some cases, more than 100 percent over last year’s numbers. But while people are perhaps more captivated than ever before by the allure and beauty of birds, a full two-thirds of North American birds are threatened by extinction from climate change. According to Audubon’s latest climate science report, Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, that count includes many species featured in this year’s winning and Top 100 photo collections. You can learn more about how climate change will affect the birds in your backyard and community by entering your zip code into Audubon‘s interactive Birds and Climate Visualizer.

But for now, check out the stunning winners of the 2020 Audubon Photography Awards.