Student photograph of northern bald ibis migration wins Nature 2026 photography competition

A photograph showing a conservation team guiding northern bald ibis during their annual migration won first place in Nature's 2026 Scientist at Work photography competition. The image depicts a passenger in an ultralight aircraft using a megaphone to sing to the birds as they fly over olive groves in southern Spain.

The birds, hand-raised by human carers, follow the aircraft on a 50-day journey covering 2,800 kilometres from south-east Germany to south-west Spain. Northern bald ibis disappeared from the northern foothills of the Alps around 400 years ago due to poaching and climate changes.

A conservation project begun in 2004 now works to re-establish a European population by guiding the birds to new wintering grounds.

Additional winning entries Other awarded photographs documented scientific work in marine and freshwater environments. One shows researchers installing an incubation chamber over a coral reef off Saudi Arabia to measure how different coral species respond to rising water temperatures.

A second image captures a biologist collecting a skin sample from a whale shark at Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia to study microorganisms living on the animal. A third photograph records scientists sampling water from an Ontario lake covered by toxic algal blooms for environmental DNA analysis.

A fourth winning entry shows an entomologist at the University of Notre Dame examining a yellow fever mosquito under a microscope as part of research into using a drug to control blood-feeding insects.