Plus, the truth about Area 51, hares of the Scottish Highlands, and the pros and cons of freezing your eggs
|  | Saturday, February 18, 2023 | | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY KARTHIK SUBRAMANIAM, @KARTHZ
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The way the bald eagle swooped in—and menaced eagles already perched on a tree—reminded photographer Karthik Subramaniam of A Dance with Dragons, the fictional dragon war by Games of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin.
Subramaniam's photograph, made in the last few hours of his trip to Alaska, took the grand prize in the National Geographic Pictures of the Year contest, earning a spot in our May edition of the magazine. The San Francisco software engineer’s entry was chosen from nearly 5,000 submissions.
See the full story here.
Please consider getting our full digital report and our magazine by subscribing here. | | | |
| | The finalists: The contest’s runnerups represented a broad spectrum. Above, riding through the Austrian Alps, Alex Berger took a one-lane road alongside a small stream—and found this golden tree blooming in a forest. There’s “a fantasy-ish inspired dimension for me,” says Berger, “which gives me goosebumps.” | | | |
| The eagle hunter: Asiilbek, a nomadic Kazakh eagle hunter, preps his golden eagle, Burged, for a horseback hunt in the grasslands of western Mongolia. “For this image, I was lying on my stomach in the prone position looking through the electronic viewfinder at the edge of the stream,” says photographer Eric Esterle. “The ground shook as Asiilbek's horse passed less than a few feet away, splashing me with ice cold water.”
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| From the air: These are salt marsh ponds in San Jose, California. These unique urban marshlands are being threatened by rising sea levels, and conservation projects are racing to turn back time and restore the region for wildlife and fish—and also for absorbing floodwaters and capturing carbon dioxide. See the other finalists—and Nat Geo's photos of the year.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY JENNIFER EMERLING | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY PARKINSON
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In its glory: The United Kingdom’s only native species of hare or rabbit has a thick, insulated pelt of brilliant white or dove gray as camouflage during the winter months. But with climate change, snowy conditions happen less often, leaving the animal exposed to predators and perhaps better off with its summer coat of mousy brown, Nat Geo reports. (Pictured above, a hare blends into a snowbank in Scotland’s Monadhliath Mountains.)
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Who’s hungry? In southwest England, a kingfisher attempts to feed her chicks at their riverbank nest. Kingfishers, despite being exquisitely handsome, are born blind, bald, and ugly—recalling the ugly duckling story. Mum and dad feed the chicks all day long for nearly a month, catching small fish along the river and bringing them back to the nest—a tunnel dug into the bank, with a small chamber at the end. Inside, it's almost completely dark, so the parents work by touch to find an open beak. Nat Geo Explorer Charlie Hamilton James talks about his photography on the birds on an episode of Overhead, our podcast.
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 | PHOTOGRAPH BY FLIP NICKLIN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
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Today’s soundtrack: Edith and the Kingpin, Herbie Hancock and Tina Turner
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Sydney Combs. Amanda Williams-Bryant, Alec Egamov, Rita Spinks, and Jeremy Brandt-Vorel also contributed this week. Have an idea? We’d love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading! | | | |
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