The Big Picture

The cover of the issue you are holding might be your first brush with a Yellow-eared Parrot, a species so rare that fewer than 100 were known to exist in the late 1990s. Or perhaps it’s the first time you’ve made eye contact with a Roseate Spoonbill, or observed it through a prism of water as it bathed.

These photos—one honoree from each continent in the 2026 Audubon Photography Awards—are arresting because they so vividly convey in a single snapshot something essential about a bird’s life. And like many of this year’s awardees, they transport you to a place you may never otherwise experience, yet that shapes a bird’s ability to thrive.

Such insight is especially evident in the winners of the Conservation Prize. In one photo, the lens widens on another Yellow-eared Parrot, this time revealing the wax palm it depends upon surrounded by crops. The image, photographer Santiago Pérez Rincón hopes, will help spur action to protect the species’ fragile recovery. We created the Conservation Prize to honor the power of imagery to do exactly that. As you’ll see, other photographers featured in this issue wield cameras in order to build a constituency for conservation as well. 

Gerrit Vyn, who photographed Teshekpuk Lake for this issue, has returned to the region for five consecutive years to document the “wild heart” of a landscape that’s both vital and imperiled—and to take Audubon readers, as he put it, to the “remote and extraordinary Arctic nursery that sustains so much of the birdlife they love.”

Conservation photographer Mac Stone, profiled by contributing editor Rachel Nuwer, has made it his mission to illustrate why the South’s remaining old-growth cypress forests, which have dwindled from 40 million acres to just 12,000, deserve saving—alligators, snakes (and, of course, Prothonotary Warblers!), and all.

Elsewhere in this issue people are leveraging visuals in a different way to call attention to a conservation need: bird-friendly buildings. Artist Holly Greenberg has enlisted hundreds of people to help shape fallen birds from scrap fabric. For The Aviary, 14-year-old Miles Wu has crafted them out of origami paper.

But how do you convey the urgency of a threat that is palpable, yet by definition hazy? That’s the question we faced as deputy editor Jessica Leber set out to explore the deleterious effects of air pollution from wildfires. Data visualizations designer Julie Rossman, aided by photo editor Lucia Vazquez, created a collage artwork to amplify the power of photography—and transport readers to a place that is becoming increasingly familiar. 

This piece originally ran in the Fall 2026 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.