Wildlife photography isn’t easy. It requires dedication and fortitude.
Long hours waiting, watching or tracking elusive and skittish animals can test the patience of even the most hardened wildlife fan.
And the frustrations can be many, including unpredictable weather and sensitive equipment. But sometimes fate also plays a hand, as Jackie Matechuk, a Cochrane-based nature photographer, recently found out.
Matechuck spent time in Ecuador, where she hoped to photograph a threatened species of South American bear called the Andean Bear. Also known as the spectacled bear, it’s named for its distinctive eye markings that make the bear look like it is wearing eyeglasses.
Even though Andean bears are considered carnivores, their diet is 95% vegetarian.
Unlike photographing bears in North America, Jackie wasn’t worried about being mauled by these shy, skittish, mostly tree-dwelling bears, but getting a photo of the elusive bears proved challenging, to say the least.
From Tears of Frustration to Tears of Joy
Matechuk got a photo of an Andean Bear, and what a photo it was, winning her the coveted international award, Nature Photographer of the Year, from Nature Talks, a Netherlands-based photography agency.
The day Matechuk took the photo was full of frustration and struggle.
First, she had to rush down into a canyon where the bears lived, and it was pouring rain and very cold. She was near a bear but couldn’t shoot in the rain.
Suddenly, the sun came out, and the temperatures soared, causing her camera to fog up. She tried to photograph the bear in a tree, but her auto-focus quit, and she could barely see through the fogged lens to focus manually.
“I was on the borderline of tears when everything started to fog up because I could see him right there, and it was so beautiful,” she told CBC News.
Matechuk did her best, manually focusing and snapping some photos with the fogged lens, and then her camera stopped working!
But fate intervened, and the fogged picture she captured of the bear gave the image the look of a painting.
“Which I probably would have never gotten to on my own, in complete honesty. So sometimes things just happen for a reason,” Matechuk said.
The photograph was selected as the best out of 21,474 entries from 96 countries, giving Matechuk the distinction of 2023’s Nature Photographer of the Year (NPOTY).
“The Spanish moss hanging from this centuries-old fig tree gives an incredible sense of three-dimensionality, while the soft light filtering through the colours highlights the profound connection between species and habitat in this image,” Nature Talks chairman Marco Gaiotti said in a media release.
Matechuk was honoured and humbled by the recognition and posted on her Facebook page: “A heartfelt thank you to the hard-working organizers of NPOTY for your tremendous hospitality, and to all the winners and finalists for the incredible talent and passion you put into your photographic work.”
Congratulations to Jackie for once again putting Albertans on the International stage.
