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.
Eared Grebes.Steve Torna/Audubon Photography Awards
Common ravens.Colleen Gara/Audubon Photography Awards
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.
