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Our 17 Favorite Wildlife Images of 2023

The IUCN Red List status assessment of saiga was changed from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened, thanks to effective national and international conservation efforts.

These scarlet macaws are found in the Moskitia, Honduras's largest forest (also one of Mesoamerica’s Five Great Forests). At the UN Climate Conference in Dubai, the Honduran government unveiled a transformative initiative to rescue and conserve it.

Mangshan pit vipers are seldom encountered in the wild, but visitors to WCS’s Bronx Zoo in 2023 had an opportunity to observe a hatchling in the nursery at the World of Reptiles.

Two snow leopard cubs debuted in 2023 at the Bronx Zoo. Snow leopards, among the world’s most elusive big cats, are rarely seen in the wild and are sometimes referred to as “the ghost of the mountains.”

It’s clear that whales have become regular “New Yorkers” as evidenced by images taken in 2023 by scientists with WCS’s Ocean Giants Program. Here: a humpback whale within sight of the New York City skyline.

This great adjutant lives in Cambodia’s Bakan Protected Landscape. Wildlife Conservation Society Cambodia, in cooperation with the Ministry of Environment and the Pursat Provincial Administration and Department of Environment, announced in 2023 the official designation of the Bakan grassland as a national protected area officially called the Bakan Protected Landscape.

WCS research in 2023 revealed that harbor porpoises—a small, shy porpoise species—lives year-round in the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary, the largest and busiest port on the U.S. East Coast.

In 2023, a tiny southern pudu fawn debuted at WCS’s Queens Zoo. Southern pudu are the smallest deer in the world.

This is a blacktip reef shark. A new study, featuring more than 150 researchers worldwide, including Wildlife Conservation Society scientists who collected data at WCS programs in Mesoamerica, South East Asia, Melanesia and East Africa, said in 2023 that overfishing is driving reef sharks toward extinction.

A new experience opened in 2023 at the Bronx Zoo, Budgie Landing, an immersive walkthrough exhibit that includes more than 1000 colorful budgerigars, commonly known as budgies

This is a lioness in Sena Oura National Park. A team of conservationists from the Government of Chad and the Wildlife Conservation Society released in 2023 a stunning image taken by a remote camera of a healthy female lion from Sena Oura National Park in Chad, where the big cats haven’t been seen in nearly two decades.

Here, a Buddhist monk assists with the release of a royal turtle. WCS, in collaboration with Mandai Nature and the Fisheries Administration of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, released 20 critically endangered royal turtles into the Sre Ambel River system in Koh Kong Province's Sre Ambel district.

The “Djéké Triangle,”an unlogged forest where this forest elephant was photographed, became a part of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in Republic of Congo in 2023.

Pictured: a Pallas’s cat living in WCS Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn. Findings from a paper published in 2023 in Cat News identified the first ever report of Pallas’s cat on Mount Everest, in the Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal.

In 2023, we released an image of scientists taking a swab from a straw-colored fruit bat to test it for zoonotic diseases such as the Ebola virus.

Pictured here: Snow monkeys at the Central Park Zoo. Japanese macaques, also known as snow monkeys, are a species native to Japan. No other non-human primate lives so far north or in such a cold climate. Their thick coats insulate them from the wind & snow, & some snow monkey troops in Japan frequent natural hot springs in winter.

This octopus is found in the Hudson Canyon. Throughout 2023, we worked to rally support to have the Hudson Canyon, about 100 miles off the coast of New York, designated as a National Marine Sanctuary.