Editor’s note: I’m the editor and founder of Tenderly, Summer Anne Burton. If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that we haven’t been publishing as often as usual lately. Mostly, that’s been because of my personal problems, some of which I talk about here, and some of which are private. But, we’re coming back! I’ll be blogging here on a near-daily basis and we’ll be bringing in new contributors and your favorite columns are all coming soon. I’ll be writing a bit more next week about what Tenderly has in store and how you can be part of…

Vendetta and Lemony are quite close. They share a lot of the same interests, after all, like rainy days, getting lost in the woods, and long walks in nature. But it would be a dramatic failure of journalism to report these facts without also noting that Vendetta is a German Shepherd. And that Lemony is an Indian runner duck. It is also salient, to this reporter, that these two best friends have a pair of sidekicks called Grisella and Heldig, and that Grisella and Heldig are pigeons, who were rescued as babies.

As any self-respecting duck/dog dynamic duo with pigeon…

Earlier this year, the photography app Agora challenged photographers to submit photos of living creatures from around the world for a contest focused on celebrating the diverse and precious life on our planet. More than 13,000 photos were submitted to the contest before the winner — a dazzling photo of an iguana by Indonesian photographer JJN Matt—was crowned.

From an absolutely charming shot of an arctic fox cub trying (and adorably failing) to look tough to a magical image of a highland cow storming through a misty heather field in the Netherlands to a heartbreaking photo of a devoted dog…

The overall winner of the latest Nature Photographer of the Year (NPOTY) competition is a photo by Roberto Marchegiani of a lone giraffe emerging from a forest in Kenya, reminiscent of a dinosaur navigating an ancient landscape, standing out in striking contrast to the dark and forbidding forest that frames her. Magdalena Herrera, the chair of the NPOTY jury, which selected the winner from nearly 20,000 submissions, explains their choice:

This image has a fairy-tale quality that goes far beyond a wildlife document. The contrast of the dark forest with branches like flashes of lightning and the little giraffe, who…

Chosen from an impressive array of entrants, the International Landscape Photographer of the Year award winners will make you look with fresh eyes at the planet we live on and the myriad different ways it finds to be beautiful. The year’s overall winner was Hong Kong photographer Kelvin Yuen, whose gorgeous portfolio of landscapes from Norway to Italy to Utah showed a truly impressive depth and variety.

Out of the 3,800 submissions, 101 photos were singled out for special recognition, and this selection of images—which ranges from volcanoes in Indonesia to icebergs in Greenland to canyons in Utah—makes for an…

The winners of this year’s 11th Epson International Pano Awards were selected from 5,859 entries from 1,452 professional and amateur photographers in 96 different countries, a record for the competition. Created to highlight achievements in panoramic photography, this year’s awards celebrated photos of natural landscapes as well as built environments.

The selection, from the winners and runners up in the “Nature” category, comprises a breathtaking array of panoramas from the frigid coast of the Barents Sea in Teriberka, Russia, to the stunning reefs of Hon Yen Island in Vietnam to the beautiful Quiver Tree Forest of Namibia. …

Amidst the magical surroundings of a forest in the Russian far east, an extremely rare Amul tigress ecstatically embraces a Manchurian fir tree, marking it with her scent to communicate with others of her kind. It took photographer Sergey Gershkov 10 months of waiting to catch a glimpse of this solitary creature, but his dedication was rewarded with a once-in-a-lifetime shot. This year’s winner of the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, “The Embrace” is a remarkable portrait of a rare and beautiful animal in her natural environment. …

The winners of the second annual Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition were chosen from over 6,500 submissions from 52 different countries. The competition seeks to reward the very best close-up, macro, and micro photographs that “help us see the world anew,” and this year it awarded prizes in multiple categories, including “Animals,” “Insects,” “Plants and Fungi,” “Micro,” “Intimate Landscape,” and “Young.”

The overall winner was a photograph by French marine molecular ecology professor Galice Hoarau, who captured a stunning image of eel larva near the Indonesian island of Lembeh during a blackwater dive. Each of the featured images uses…