A new set of award-winning aerial images is giving viewers a rare look at wildlife from overhead, turning familiar animals and landscapes into striking patterns, scenes and stories. The pictures come from the second International Aerial Photographer of the Year contest, which named its winners and highlighted 101 leading images.

A selection of 16 photographs focuses on animals viewed from above, showing how altitude can change the way nature is seen. Instead of eye-level portraits, the collection emphasizes scale, movement and habitat, revealing both the beauty of wildlife and the environments animals depend on.

One of the standout images described in the feature shows a polar bear gripping the edge of an iceberg in East Greenland, looking out over sea ice and testing the air. From above, the scene underscores a landscape in constant motion, where ice shifts and breaks apart, adding a sense of fragility to the animal’s surroundings.

Taken together, the contest images present wildlife photography in a different form—less about a single close encounter and more about the relationship between animals and the larger world around them. The result is a vivid, sometimes mysterious perspective on nature that is difficult to capture from the ground.