(CNN) — Get ready to laugh, guffaw or even laugh, because this is the most important time of the year for those who love funny animal pictures.
The UK-based Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards judges reviewed more than 1,800 photos submitted from 85 countries and judged whether they were funny, funny or just plain fun.
And the overall winner for 2023 – please, this is a photo worthy of a musical accompaniment – is the kangaroo doing the air guitar pose.
Photographer Jason Moore captured a female western gray kangaroo one morning in a field of wildflowers on the outskirts of Perth, Australia. The author won a handmade trophy, a photography bag and a week-long safari in Kenya’s Masai Mara region.
There were six winners in the category, including young photographer Jacek Stankiewicz, who took home the Junior Prize with his image of some feisty greenfinches, titled ‘Dispute’. The winning image in the underwater category was a photograph of a dancing otter, taken by a Singaporean photographer called Otter Kwik, which is either a pseudonym or a global example of nominative determinism.
Wildlife conservation
There were 10 other photos that got a special mention. These include an elegant Ubud monkey who uses his tail as a fake moustache, an enchanted turtle who befriends a dragonfly, and a lively baby kangaroo that throws “jazz hands” into the air.
Here we leave you the photos that were part of the winners and special mentions:
You can see the rest of this year’s finalists in our previous article here.
However, all this comic anthropomorphism is not without seriousness.
The awards, founded in 2015 by professional photographers Paul Joynson-Hicks and Tom Sollam, also promote wildlife conservation. This year’s competition supports the Whitley Trust for Nature, a British charity that helps fund conservationists around the world.
But for the unconditional, the laughter doesn’t end here.
The first wildlife-guided African comedy safari will launch in Tanzania in October 2024, guided by awards founders Hicks and Salaam and wildlife expert Kate Humble.
An eight-night trip costs £11,425 (about US$13,900) per person in a double room. Beware of laugh-out-loud moments on open safari vehicles: you don’t want to start laughing out loud during the wildebeest migration.
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