It portrays a white bear sleeping on a bed dug in a small drifting iceberg, the photo that promises to become an icon of the transformation of the Arctic: it is the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award, the international competition that has been held since 1965 it is promoted by the BBC Wildlife Magazine and which has been joined by the Natural History Museum of London since 1984.
Here the photos will be exhibited until June 30th.
A turtle playing with an insect and two lionesses cuddling a cub are among the four finalist photos, together with a bird with spread wings drawn by a flock in the sky of Rome and a spectacular polar aurora illuminating jellyfish.
The five photos were selected from a shortlist of 25, of the over 75 thousand who participated in the competition from all over the world.
It is titled "
Bed of Ice
", the photo of the sleeping white bear and was taken in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard by Nima Sarikhani.
"It is an image that allows us to see the beauty and fragility of our planet", observes the director of the Museum, Douglas Gurr.
"It is a provocative image, which recalls the bond between an animal and its habitat" and which at the same time represents, he adds, "the dangerous impacts of global warming and habitat loss".
It is titled "The
happy turtle
", the first of the four finalist photos, taken by Tzahi Finkelstein in Israel and which immortalizes a turtle that seems to smile and play with the dragonfly that has landed on its beak.
The "
Murmur of the starlings
" is the photo taken in Rome in which Daniel Dencescu managed to capture the moment in which a flight of starlings takes on the appearance of a large bird.
'Murmuring' is the term that commonly refers to the noise of birds calling in the flock.
Mark Boyd captioned
the photo taken in Kenya of two lionesses caring for a cub early in the morning as "
Shared parenting ."
The fourth finalist is "
Aurora Jellyfish
", in which Audun Rikardsen immortalized, in a Norwegian fjord, two four-leaf clover jellyfish illuminated by the reflections of a spectacular Northern Lights.
It often happens that these jellyfish gather in hundreds, attracted by the light of the auroras.
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