A pet saddleback tamarin hangs on to Yoina Mameria Nontsotega as the Matsigenka girl takes a dip in the Yomibato River, deep inside Peru’s ManuÌ National Park. Photo by Charlie Hamilton James.
Out of 2,290,225 photographs by 91 photographers, National Geographic picked the 52 best images of the year.
As an evening storm lights up the sky near Wood River, Nebraska, about 413,000 sandhill cranes arrive to roost in the shallows of the Platte River. Photograph by Randy Olson.
I picked three of the images to share here. Each touches me in a different way. The top photo because it is such a wonderful view of a child and a pet. The middle photo because of the sheer evocative beauty of the scene in a splendid moment. The bottom is an upsetting and powerful image because it is so wrong when human greed results in needless destruction of an endangered species.
Poachers killed this black rhinoceros for its horn with high-caliber bullets in South Africa’s Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park. Black rhinos number only about 5,000 today. Photograph by Brent Stirton
Which of the 52 images are your favorites? You can see them all here.