The Big Picture | Audubon

The quilt of the difficulty you might be holding is perhaps your first brush with a Yellow-eared Parrot, a species so uncommon that fewer than 100 had been recognized to exist within the late Nineteen Nineties. Or maybe it’s the primary time you’ve made eye contact with a Roseate Spoonbill, or noticed it by way of a prism of water because it bathed.

These images—one honoree from every continent within the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards—are arresting as a result of they so vividly convey in a single snapshot one thing important a couple of chook’s life. And like lots of this yr’s awardees, they transport you to a spot it’s possible you’ll by no means in any other case expertise, but that shapes a chook’s capacity to thrive.

Such perception is very evident within the winners of the Conservation Prize. In a single photograph, the lens widens on one other Yellow-eared Parrot, this time revealing the wax palm it relies upon upon surrounded by crops. The picture, photographer Santiago Pérez Rincón hopes, will assist spur motion to guard the species’ fragile restoration. We created the Conservation Prize to honor the ability of images to do precisely that. As you’ll see, different photographers featured on this subject wield cameras so as to construct a constituency for conservation as properly. 

Gerrit Vyn, who photographed Teshekpuk Lake for this issue, has returned to the area for 5 consecutive years to doc the “wild coronary heart” of a panorama that’s each very important and imperiled—and to take Audubon readers, as he put it, to the “distant and extraordinary Arctic nursery that sustains a lot of the birdlife they love.”

Conservation photographer Mac Stone, profiled by contributing editor Rachel Nuwer, has made it his mission for instance why the South’s remaining old-growth cypress forests, which have dwindled from 40 million acres to simply 12,000, deserve saving—alligators, snakes (and, in fact, Prothonotary Warblers!), and all.

Elsewhere on this subject persons are leveraging visuals another way to name consideration to a conservation want: bird-friendly buildings. Artist Holly Greenberg has enlisted a whole bunch of individuals to assist shape fallen birds from scrap fabric. For The Aviary, 14-year-old Miles Wu has crafted them out of origami paper.

However how do you convey the urgency of a menace that’s palpable, but by definition hazy? That’s the query we confronted as deputy editor Jessica Leber got down to discover the deleterious effects of air pollution from wildfires. Knowledge visualizations designer Julie Rossman, aided by photograph editor Lucia Vazquez, created a collage paintings to amplify the ability of images—and transport readers to a spot that’s turning into more and more acquainted. 

This piece initially ran within the Fall 2026 subject. To obtain our print journal, change into a member by making a donation today.