Iberian Lynx Photo Wins 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice

A record-breaking 85,917 votes delivered Austrian photographer Josef Stefan the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Nuveen People's Choice Award 2026 for a single frame of a cat playing with its lunch. The image, titled "Flying Rodent," shows something most field photographers spend careers hoping to witness: an Iberian lynx standing upright on a dirt path, one paw raised, batting a small rodent into the air mid-hunt.

Josef had wanted to photograph lynxes for a long time, and was delighted when the opportunity arose to spend two weeks observing them from a hide at Torre de Juan Abad, Ciudad Real, Spain. It is common for young lynxes to play with their prey before killing it. This one repeatedly threw the rodent high in the air and caught it again. To Josef, it looked as if the rodent could fly. The whole game lasted about 20 minutes before the lynx got bored, then took the rodent behind a bush and ate it.

To freeze the peak moment of that 20-minute performance, Stefan used a Nikon Z9 with a Nikon Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S, shooting at 1/4000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 2000. At that shutter speed, even the rodent's airborne arc would be tack-sharp. The background collapses into soft-focus forest, pulling every gram of attention onto the lynx.

"Flying Rodent" secured the top spot against 23 other shortlisted photographs, all chosen from 60,636 entries from 113 countries and territories, making the public's margin of preference all the more striking. "I never imagined that a single moment could take me this far," Stefan said when his image was first named a finalist. After the win was confirmed, he put the achievement in the context of his career: "The journey to take this image was more than just another photographic adventure, it was the pursuit of a dream that had been with me for years: encountering the Iberian lynx, one of the rarest and most endangered wild cats in the world. In the early 2000s, this species was on the brink of extinction. Today, there are now over 2,000 thanks to consistent conservation efforts. The Iberian lynx is a living symbol of hope, showing what can happen when we take responsibility, act consciously and focus our attention where it's most needed."

The conservation angle is not incidental to why the image resonated with voters. In the early 2000s, the Iberian lynx was teetering on the brink of extinction. Today, the population has climbed to over 2,000, entirely due to sustained conservation efforts. A species that once appeared doomed is now the subject of a People's Choice award-winning image seen by tens of thousands worldwide.

For the first time, the winner of the public vote has earned a place in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition in London, with Josef's photo joining the award-winning images selected by the competition jury from the record-breaking 60,636 entries. The winner and four runners-up will be showcased on the voting screens in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London, until the exhibition closes on Sunday 12 July 2026, with "Flying Rodent" also featured on the gallery wall alongside the winning images in the main competition.

The four highly commended images include a group of flamingos standing out against a stark industrial backdrop of power lines in Walvis Bay, Namibia, by Alexandre Brisson; a mother polar bear and her three cubs pausing peacefully on the Hudson Bay coast by Christopher Paetkau; Will Nicholls' silhouetted pair of young bear cubs play-fighting in the middle of a road in Jasper National Park; and Kohei Nagira's photograph of a sika deer carrying the interlocked severed head of a rival male.

For Stefan, the 30-year career milestone arrived not in a studio or on assignment, but from inside a hide in central Spain, watching a cat decide to juggle its dinner.