Experience the Wonder of Birds With These 11 Winning Photos From the Bird Photographer of the Year Contest

A northern gannet flies with a sharp focus, eyes peeled for the movement of prey underwater. When it locks in on a quarry—a school of fish, perhaps—the bird tucks its wings, turning its body into a diving torpedo. The predator then plummets into the water at more than 50 miles per hour.

Sometimes, full flocks will descend upon the ocean, falling like drops of voracious rain. Photographer Henley Spiers of the United Kingdom witnessed this dramatic hunt off the shore of Scotland. His resulting shot earned the grand prize in this year’s Bird Photographer of the Year contest, which announced its results this week.

Spiers’ photograph captures one of these streamlined birds entering the water, looking perfectly hydrodynamic with its wings tucked. Behind it, the sun lights a spot on the water’s surface. That “sunball” grabbed Spiers’ attention, he writes in an Instagram post.

After a long wait, a gannet finally dived through in the perfect spot, and I met the bird as it careened under the sea.” In comments on Instagram, Spiers notes that dead fish were used as bait to capture this photo, a fact that he says he made clear in his contest entry. The Bird Photographer of the Year contest received more than 24,000 images from photographers across the globe. Carlyn Kranking is Smithsonian magazine's associate web editor for science.