Established in 2008, the Fritz Pölking Prize celebrates extraordinary nature photography stories and portfolios. And this year's winning series certainly fits that bill.
Tales of the Forest Keepers, by Dutch biologist and photojournalist Michiel van Noppen, takes us into the rainforests of Costa Rica and tells the story of the extraordinary relationship between the Baird’s tapir – the largest native land mammal in Central America – and the rare Jícaro Danto tree.
Above, you can see my favorite image from the project. Two Baird's tapirs, the older Mamita and a youngster called Julian, forage around the base of a tree in a Costa Rican rainforest. Clusters of cucumber-like fruit hang from the trunk. Mamita, wearing a GPS collar, stretches up to feed.
It's not a particularly showy or dramatic image. There's no front-cover 'wow-factor' here. Yet this is the picture that explains everything about the story.
The tree is a Jícaro Danto (Parmentiera valerii), found only in the Guanacaste Mountain Range; around 600 are thought to survive in the wild. Its fibrous fruit has just one disperser: the endangered Baird's tapir, which eats it, wanders for kilometres and deposits the seeds in a ready-made pile of fertilizer.
Mamita is guiding Julian around the Jícaro Danto trees of Tapir Valley Nature Reserve, a buffer zone of over 100 hectares next to Tenorio Volcano National Park. You're watching one generation teach the next how to keep a symbiosis alive.
It's also good to know that this photo didn't depend on having the latest or most expensive kit. The camera is a Nikon D3100, the 14MP APS-C DSLR that Nikon launched as an entry-level model in 2010.
The lens is a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM, set to 18mm, or 27mm in full-frame terms. Exposure was 1/200 sec at f/8 and ISO800, in manual.
To my mind, the most important decision here was going wide with the shot. Had the framing been tighter, at best he'd have got a good close-up.
This picture, however, gives you the whole shebang: the fruit at the top of the trunk, the mother feeding in the middle, the son bottom-left, the trunk acting as a central spine for the eye to follow and dense forest framing everything beautifully.
In the words of juror Hanneke Van Camp: "That's exactly what conservation photography is about: making the complex connections between species visible, bringing together scientific and local knowledge and showing ways for people and nature to live well alongside each other."
Van Noppen will be honored as part of the official award ceremony of the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 competition, held at the International Nature Photography Festival on October 23.
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