He trudged on through the bitterly cold Yukon woods in his snowshoes, determined to track down his elusive subject matter. Hiking solo, 55-year-old wildlife photographer John Marriott was set on photographing one particularly stealthy apex predator.
The odds and the elements seemed against him.
On the first week, he had tagged along with a lynx researcher guide, yet they found no fresh tracks let alone any real lynx to photograph at all. “We went everywhere, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, hiking, driving—everything,” Marriott told The Epoch Times. “We were checking all of her traps and everything and just couldn’t find anything.”
Then the guide called it quits. “Thankfully, I booked the second week on my own,” Marriott said.
On week two, Marriott, who hails from Salmon Arm in B.C., was a one-man show. Dense thicket made the going tough while minus 29-degree temperatures promised suboptimal shooting conditions at best.
Marriott, who was gifted a Kodak Instamatic at age 6 and who has travelled all over Canada photographing animals, recently won in the Animal Portraits category of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards held by the UK’s Natural History Museum.
He says he never expected what he captured through his lens that cold day in February 2020 would send him to London where, at a black-tie ceremony in early October, he mingled with the world’s top photographers.
‘Really Fresh Tracks’
As he retraced his journey to find the lynx, Marriott says he set out early.“Two days into that second week I came across tracks of a mother and two kittens, and I started just focusing all my efforts on that area,” he said
Geared up for a whole day in Arctic weather, Marriott left his car behind and trekked into the deep snow.
From dawn till dusk, the photographer searched. Days passed. On the second-last day, he found what he was looking for. “Really fresh tracks along this little side road,” he said. “I immediately threw on my backpack and snowshoes.”
The tracks belonged to three lynx, a family with kittens, he said, which he watched hunt snowshoe hare, followed into a wide open space, and found huddled cozily on the far side. The picture-perfect feline family portrait looked so artful, it was almost like a Robert Bateman painting.
“There were little gusts of wind that were coming from behind them,” Marriott said. “Every time a gust would come, their ears would perk up and they'd open the eyes a little bit.”
The all too adorable lynx kittens had stayed with their mother an extra year, the photographer explained, probably because of the boom and bust cycle lynx and snowshoe hare populations experience was in a dip. Hunting was scarce for the lynx that year, and so the baby cats stuck with mom a bit longer for nourishment.
“Because she’s better at killing snowshoe hares,” Marriott said. “Normally, there were lots of snowshoe hares around, they would have gone off on their own.”
‘Cool Shot’
After capturing his elusive photo, Marriott knew he had a “cool shot” but didn’t expect that it would win him a Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. He thought his followers on social media would love it, so he posted it online.“I love that kittens are peeking out from behind Mom,” he said. “I put it on Instagram and Facebook and things like that. Going to be releasing a limited edition print of it later this month.”
This year, he entered the photo into the prestigious wildlife photography competition, and the rest is history.
To be chosen from 60,000 entries globally to win the coveted award was “pretty cool,” he said.
“I’ve been runner-up before,” he added. “I’ve had a Royal Canadian Mint coin, I’ve had Canada Post stamps, I’ve had the licence plates in B.C. feature my images. I’ve had quite a lot of accolades. I’ve been very, very fortunate in my career.
“This one, I would say, is the absolute top of the heap.”
