LONDON — U.K. photographer Alison Tuck has won the Sterna People’s Choice Award at the 2025 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards for “Now which direction is my nest?,” a windblown image of a gannet carrying grass at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire, England, April 29, 2026.
The photograph prevailed in a public vote from a 41-photo shortlist, according to WSVN’s CNN Wire report, after judges had already named it a Highly Commended image in the wider 2025 competition.
Why the Comedy Wildlife Awards photo stood out
The frame works because the joke is immediate: a seabird doing an ordinary nesting job looks briefly defeated by its own building materials. Tuck said the image was made on a “very breezy day” when onshore wind pushed gannets toward and up the cliffs as they collected grass for nests, PetaPixel reported.
Tuck said winning the public-vote category meant a great deal to her and thanked the people who supported the image. The reaction fits the contest’s appeal: photos that are technically strong but instantly readable as tiny, comic wildlife stories.
The 2026 edition is already open for photo and video submissions until June 30, and the contest remains free for photographers around the world, according to Popular Science’s finalist roundup.
A funny contest with a conservation message
The awards were founded in 2015 by Paul Joynson-Hicks and Tom Sullam and use humor to draw attention to wildlife conservation. Nikon says the competition donates 10% of its profits to the Whitley Fund for Nature’s Next Gen initiative, according to Nikon’s overview of the awards.
Tuck’s People’s Choice victory follows the main 2025 awards, where Mark Meth Cohn’s “High Five,” showing a gorilla in Rwanda, was named overall winner in the official 2025 winners gallery. Her gannet image’s later public-vote win gives the year a second crowd-pleasing wildlife punchline.
How the gannet continues a Comedy Wildlife Awards tradition
The grass-covered gannet joins a run of animal images that have traveled widely because they make real behavior look charmingly human. In 2024, Milko Marchetti’s “Stuck Squirrel” won with a red squirrel half disappearing into a tree, a moment PetaPixel covered after the awards night. In 2023, Jason Moore’s “Air Guitar Roo” won after a kangaroo appeared to strike a rock-star pose in a field, ABC News reported. In 2022, Jennifer Hadley’s photo of a lion cub tumbling from a tree took the overall honor, while a salmon appearing to smack a bear became one of the year’s memorable supporting images, OPB and NPR reported.
That continuity helps explain why Tuck’s gannet landed so well with voters. The best Comedy Wildlife Awards images are not staged jokes; they are split-second observations where real animal behavior briefly mirrors everyday human frustration. For one windy nesting-season bird, that moment was enough to win the public’s vote.
