Wildlife Photographer of the Year - Behaviour, birdsWildlife Photographer of the Year - Behaviour, birds 

This is ‘Practice makes Perfect’ by Jack Zhi from the USA. This photograph was taken in Los Angeles, California, USA and is the 2024 category winner of ‘Behavior: Birds’. This is a landscape image with a bird right in the centre. The wings of the bird are face on, almost. You can see the bird's tummy. The wings spread out with the tail feathers in an upside down fan shape. The colour of the feathers gives the stripy black and white effect horizontally, especially noticeable across the tail feathers. Each feather is rounded at the end on the wings. The black and white colours on the feathers don't quite line up as much as they do on the tail feathers, so it kind of looks a bit more checkered rather than striped, but there is black on the tips of all the wing feathers. The photograph must have been taken from below because you can see the underside of the bird and its feet. The feet are quite hard to see because they blend in and camouflage with the bird's body. You can see it's got yellow talons. These talons or claws are at the end of finger type shapes. Because the bird is against the blue sky, it really stands out. You can see some very faint clouds. We can notice the bird’s 2 grey blue eyes and beak. The bird's eyes are focused on something above it, a red and black butterfly with its wings spread out. The bird in the centre gives the image quite a lot of power. The image feels quite dynamic because of the way it's framed. It feels like an action shot. However, you can't see the overall shape of the butterfly. You can guess it by looking at the side of its wings. The bird is a young Falcon and it's actually practicing its hunting skills. These are fast birds, so it would be quite a challenge to get a photograph like this and frame it so incredibly well.