“That’s nature.”

— Yongqing Bao, Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2019

In the end, a striking image of an eventual fight-to-the-death between a fox and a marmot earned mainland-Chinese photographer Yongqing Bao the top prize at the 55th annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards.

The image, like many great photographs, is not entirely what it seems at first glance. It looks as if it might be the subject of a funny caption competition, but as it happened it tells a deadly serious story. The marmot would end up fighting for its life, and it would lose. “That’s nature,” Yongqing said simply, in accepting his award at a black-tie ceremony Tuesday at London’s historic Natural History Museum.

That’s a frozen-in-time moment of life and death and survival of the fittest, where natural selection has determined that there will always be two types of animals in nature: predator and prey. One must die so that the other can survive.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards are unique in that there are several categories of equal standing; the winner in each category then goes into a pool from which the title Photographer of the year is chosen. Yongqing — in the traditional Chinese, a person’s surname comes first, before the Western first name — also won the category of mammal behaviour.

The award also marks the first time a photographer from mainland Chinese photographer has earned wildlife photography’s top prize. It comes mere weeks after a Chinese-language edition of the harrowing, award-winning coffee-table book Photographers Against Wildlife Crime was published in the UK, a fact lauded by the book’s co-editor, photojournalist Keith Wilson early Wednesday morning. Wilson and co-editor Britta Jaschinski decided to print a Chinese-language edition of their powerful, emotionally wrenching book — first published to widespread critical acclaim a year ago — because the message of nature conservation is critical if the world’s

endangered species are to survive the looming Sixth Mass Extinction. Bestowing such a prestigious title, the most prestigious in the competitive field of nature photographer, is also a rallying cry for conservation photographers in the world’s most populous country, with the fastest growing economy,

Yongqing’s day job is director and chief ecological photographer of China’s Qilian Mountain Nature Conservation Association. Yongqing is also a member of China’s Qinghai Photographers Association and deputy secretary-general of the Qinghai Wildlife Photographers Association.

Yongqing captured his image of a Himalayan marmot in the very same Qilian mountains, moments after it emerged from hibernation from its winter den and encountered a Tibetan fox with three hungry cubs to feed. The Himalayan fox is one of the world’s highest-altitude dwelling mammals. It relies on its thick fur to survive the extreme cold of Himalayan winter. During the peak of winter, it sleeps for nearly six months burrowed deep in the ground with the rest of its colony, seeking comfort in numbers. Every spring, the marmots emerge from their burrows, where predators lie in wait — not unlike lions and hyenas during the annual wildebeest birthing season every February in Tanzania’s Lake Ndutu region, on the edge of Serengeti National Park.

Life in the high Himalayas where mainland China meets Tibet is harsh and unforgiving, as captured in Yongqing’s image. Yongqing staked out a snow-covered alpine meadow for several hours on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to capture the moment. After hours of waiting, the action happened in a flash: The fox had hunkered down in the ice, hoping to catch a marmot unawares.

An exhibition of the winners’ work in all categories will be on display at the Natural History Museum from Friday, Oct. 18 to May 31 of next year.