A photo taken in Churchill has earned Ontario’s Don Gutoski the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015 from the Natural History Museum London.
The photo is entitled “A Tale of Two Foxes.” It features a red fox, increasingly common in Arctic areas, victoriously holding the carcass of an Arctic fox as it prepares to hide the remains for a later time.
As the red fox holds the Arctic fox in its jaws, their facial expressions are almost identical, the fallen fox a haunting afterimage of the other.
However, National Geographic’s Kathy Moran notes that the image was selected for its symbolic power: “What might simply be a straightforward interaction between predator and prey struck the jury as a stark example of climate change, with red foxes encroaching on Arctic fox territory. It is one of the strongest single storytelling photographs I have seen.”
