Wildlife Photographer of the Year - Young photographers 11-14
Audio description
Transcript
This is ‘An Evening Meal’ by Parham Pourahmad from the USA. This photograph was taken at Ed. R Levin Country Park, California, USA and is the 2024 category winner of ‘Young Photographers 11 to 14 years’. When you first look at this, it's a very dark photo. It's got lots of dark colours and your eye goes straight to the middle, as if there's some sort of spotlight shining there, because that's where the light is coming from. What you first notice is the eye and it's the eye of a bird which looks like a yellow ring with a big black pupil in the middle. Then you see the rest of the animal and you realise that it's some sort of bird of prey that's got its head down. The bird has speckled feathers brown and white. It has some fluffier, thinner feathers too, which are the lightest parts in the photo. They are kind of white. I imagined that the image was taken in the morning or evening as it feels like there is a low light coming in. When you look more closely, you can see what the bird is doing. At first, you don't really realise what's going on because you see the head of the squirrel and it's got its eyes closed. You can see its big teeth and its nose and its whiskers and its ears. The head of the squirrel is pointing up, almost as if it were looking at the bird. But it is dead. You can see the entrails within its body, and you can see that they are a really rich red colour. These are not directly illuminated by the sunlight, and I think those colours contrast well with the outside of the picture; the area behind the bird, which is the rich green foliage of the tree that the bird is sitting in. The squirrel and the bird are on a branch that has some paler green lichen growing on it, just coincidentally beneath where the squirrel is. When you look more deeply into the photograph, you start spotting elements that you wouldn't initially see because of the way that it's framed. This includes the bird's feet, the talons are on either side of the squirrel, which again is in shadow, so you don't necessarily see it straight away. But the branch is quite thick and probably takes up about a quarter of the bottom of the photo. Behind the bird, you can see the green leaves of the tree and little bits of blue, which I guess must be the blue sky behind it. I'm guessing that the photographer might have had a long lens to take this photograph. Initially, this image shows just the bird. But when you look more closely and see the squirrel, it becomes a bit more intimate and a little bit more shocking. You see the magnificence of this bird, and then you see the brutality of nature, that this is what the bird needs to do to survive. It needs to eat.