These Audubon photo winners show birds in all their strangeness and splendor

At Grist, our favorite bird is the climate hawk, but we concede that other birds have merit, too, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. Case in point: the avian creatures featured in Audubon Society’s 2016 Photography Awards.

From interspecies interactions (such as the grand-prize shot of a bald eagle harassing a blue heron) to proof that birds of a feather really do flock together (the clan of eared grebe, below), these winning photos show our avian friends in all their strangeness and splendor.

But a few of them, it has to be said, seem like jerks (talking about you, Venezuelan Troupial). Check out the full gallery of 100 award-winning shots.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified a photograph of the Venezuelan Troupial by Ben Knoot as a winner of the Amateur Category. We swapped out the photo of the Troupial with ravens because we didn’t have permission to publish it. We regret the errors.