See the Hilarious Animal Shenanigans Captured in Photos and Videos Shortlisted for the 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards

The beloved Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the 2026 finalists, and the competition couldn’t be fiercer. The contest received more than 10,000 photos—a record for the awards—from 112 countries, and the images show all sorts of shenanigans, from a bird wearing a flower hat to a family of meerkats preparing for a photoshoot. Judges including photographers, media presenters and comedians narrowed the entries down to just a few picks for each of the four categories.

The shortlist includes 40 individual finalists, three finalists under 16 years old, four portfolio finalists and nine video finalists. All will be showcased from December 9 to 13 at Gallery@Oxo in London. The competition is now truly global, and a decade or so on, we want to make it even bigger, funnier and more far-reaching than ever,” Tom Sullam, a photographer and co-founder of the competition, says in a statement.

The judging panel will examine the finalists’ entries over the next few weeks, and the overall winner, category winners and highly commended winners will be announced on December 8. The top prize is a safari with Alex Walker’s Serian in Kenya’s Masai Mara reserve, described as a “photographer’s paradise,” and other prizes include Nikon cameras and photography gear. Here are some of our favorite entries on the shortlist.

Heather Cudworth’s Lessons features two elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park during a four-year drought. The older elephant is giving the younger elephant a dust bath, a practice that provides the animals with protection from the sun and soothes their skin. But the dust went right into the tiny elephant’s face.

However, I am certain she got her point across. Listen to your mother, little one.” The photographer of this eye-catching image, Phiané Oosthuizen, is in the under 16 category. The up-and-coming artist was at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, South Africa, when they snapped this shot of a colorful southern double-collared sunbird, which had just been feeding from a flower.

For a moment, it looked as though he had suddenly put on an enormous beak and was playing dress-up! It was such a funny and unexpected little moment that I was so grateful to have captured it,” Oosthuizen writes. In Little Godzilla, Udo Harms captures a reddish squirrel with a giant mouthful of grass in Hanover, Germany.