My Top 20 Nature Photos of 2013-2020

As you may know if you’ve been reading some of my earlier posts this year, I joined the Norfolk Field Naturalists this past Summer. This has meant joining with local nature enthusiasts for hikes (see NFN Fungi Hike posts, part 1, part 2, and part 3) and listening in on monthly presentations beginning in September. The December NFN meeting is going to be a “Members’ Night” in which members of the group can present up to 20 pictures or a short video of trips or observations of their own. I was excited by the prospect of sharing my photos and observations (as indeed I’ve been doing with this blog site).

So… what photos to select for my portion of the slideshow? I decided to present the highlight photos of my own past observations to demonstrate a bit about myself and my experiences.

I realized that I needed to pick out 20 of my top observations/nature photos of all time. At first 20 seemed like a lot… but going through my personal archives of nature photos I soon came to understand that it would actually be quite difficult to decide on which photos to include as I have take quite a few over the past several years.*

*literally thousands of photos of hundreds of species

So, to help narrow my choices down I eliminated this past year, 2021. I did this for a couple of reasons: 

1. I would like to go over my 2021 nature photos on my blog (and I already have showcased many here), and I wanted to do something different for this presentation, ie. I wanted to review other photos and observations than ones I was already planning to write about.
2. I believe I have truly improved a lot in my nature photography and I personally think that 2021 contains some of my best photos. If this is true, then this past year of observations might get over-represented in a list of “best nature photos”.

2021 out of the way, I only had about 8 years of nature photos to trawl through for those greatest hits. To decide which photos to include in my list, I considered the following:

1. First and foremost, they had to be good pictures, high-quality, focused, nice composition. I usually don’t think of my pictures in this way because I’m interested and excited by the organisms involved and not the quality of the photos per se. But for a slideshow I wanted to have only the most crisp clear photos.
2. Unique or rare organisms or behaviour were preferred. I have taken many pictures of Honeybees (Apis mellifera) and American Red Squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) but unless they were doing something interesting or were exceptionally beautiful shots I wanted to compile a list of the more rare (to me) species that I’ve seen and photographed.
3. Taxonomic Variety. I wanted the photos to reflect my own interests in nature which is pretty wide in scope, encompassing basically all that’s living with a particular emphasis (partly just because I can observe and photograph them more regularly and easily) on Insects and Birds. In other words, I didn’t want the 20 top photos to be a list made up of half Hymenoptera and half Lepidoptera, I wanted to have a good variety of organisms from across the tree of life.

As you can probably tell from the above, the list at the end of the day is quite… arbitrary. It’s my own decision what to include and what not to include, what’s particularly interesting and what organisms are different enough to showcase. I feel like this preamble is more for myself than for anyone else because I think everyone already assumes that a list such as this will be arbitrary but I felt while picking photos I needed to have some sort of guidelines to create a somewhat representative list. Anyway, boring stuff out of the way, next post will be the first of 20 of my top 20 Nature photos taken between 2013 and 2020!

Until then, I will leave you with a few of my photos that didn’t quite make it into my final list:

Downy Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens) on the Lynn Valley Trail, February 2018:

Bog Copper Butterfly (Tharsalea epixanthe), in Algonquin Provincial Park, July 2018:

Six-spotted Tiger Beetle (Cicindela sexpunctata) on the Lynn Valley Trail, May 2020: