22 Best Photos From The Canadian Wildlife Photography Of The Year Competition

A pair of red-necked grebes in Toronto’s Colonel Samuel Smith Park performs an elaborate mating ritual involving synchronized swimming and loud vocalizations.

A family of raccoons peeks out from the hollow of a tree in St. Thomas, Ont.

A great sundew at Echo Lake on Vancouver Island, B.C. Sundews are carnivorous; insects are attracted to their sugary scent, then trapped by the sticky drops on the plant’s leaves, which bend around their prey to facilitate digestion.

A split-second capture freezes the moment a startled ruffed grouse rockets out of a tree in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ont.

A sandworm (Alitta virens) swims in the St. Lawrence Estuary in Rimouski, Que. Sandworms spend most of their lives in burrows in the seafloor, emerging only to eat, but during their spring mating season, males become colourful and swim to the surface to fertilize the females’ eggs.

A giant Pacific octopus rests amid the kelp forest in Browning Pass, Port Hardy, B.C.

Grizzly bear siblings playfight during a burst of heavy rain in B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest.

Black bear cubs warily eye their surroundings while following their mother through Waterton Lakes National Park, Alta.

An American mink makes a dash toward the camera after caching some prey in the brush at Lynde Shores Conservation Area in Whitby, Ont.

A black-bellied plover rises above the surface of Frank Lake, near High River, Alta.

A solitary sandpiper fuels up for its fall migrations at Lemoine Point Conservation Area in Kingston, Ont.

Sharp-tailed grouse battle it out for the attention of a potential mate at a traditional lek (mating ground) near Wainwright, Alta.

A sandhill crane preens its feathers at Burnaby Lake in Burnaby, B.C.

Warm spring sunlight illuminates a pasqueflower — commonly known as a prairie crocus — at Cranberry Flats Conservation Area in Saskatoon. The emergence of these blooms is an annual sign that spring has arrived.

Sunlight filters through the lichens dangling over Khutzeymateen Inlet, B.C.

Scheuchzer’s cottongrass (Eriophorum scheuchzeri) — known in the North Baffin dialect of Inuktitut as kanguujat (“what looks like snow geese”) — on the shore of Colour Lake on Axel Heiberg Island (Umingmat Nunaat), Nunavut.

The photographer was searching for native bees to photograph in his backyard in Asquith, Sask. when he noticed this thick-headed fly (Myopa clausa) on a raspberry cane. These flies tend to hang out where they can find hosts — namely bees and wasps — for their parasitic larvae.