Family Rest. Finalist for the Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year Nuveen People’s Choice Award. Photo by Christopher Paetkau. Click image to vote for this photo.
Some photographs earn their place on the world stage not through technical wizardry alone, but through the collision of preparation, patience, and the kind of wild luck that only the sub-Arctic can deliver.
For Vancouver-based filmmaker and photographer Christopher Paetkau of Always Build Studios, that moment arrived on a stretch of boulder-strewn Hudson Bay coastline north of Seal River Heritage Lodge in the summer of 2024, and it’s now shortlisted for one of wildlife photography’s most prestigious honours.
Paetkau’s image “Family Rest” is a drone portrait of a polar bear mother and her three cubs lying huddled on the tidal flats. It has been selected as one of 24 shortlisted photographs for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Nuveen People’s Choice Award 2026 by the Natural History Museum in London.
With more than 60,000 entries from 113 countries and territories considered, making the shortlist is no small thing. Public voting is open now through March 18, 2026, with the winner to be announced March 25.
The shot has already turned up in outlets from People magazine to Forbes, but the story behind it is pure Churchill Wild.
Paetkau was part of a joint venture with Churchill Wild, travelling the coast by Sherp, the amphibious all-terrain workhorse that lurches over beach ridges and crosses river mouths. On this stretch of coast, though, it’s the terrain that does the real punishing.
“I don’t think there’s a bumpier ride on the planet,” said Paetkau.
He was travelling with Churchill Wild guides Quent Plett and Adam Reimer, heading north along the coast when Plett spotted a head rise from the tundra. It was the mother and her three cubs, the same family that had wandered past the lodge the previous evening to the delight of guests.
A polar bear mother successfully raising triplets is genuinely rare. Churchill Wild guide Terry Elliott, who has spent 17 years on these shores, has only seen triplets twice.
Plett led the team in a patient two-hour approach, and it was in that first moment of discovery, the family at rest on the mud and rock of the coastal flats, that Paetkau launched the DJI Mavic 3 Pro and captured the image.
“It was a right-place-at-right-time thing,” he said. “But knowing they were there, and knowing what to do once you’ve found them, that matters too. Honestly, it’s Quent and Adam’s show.”
This is not Paetkau’s first time on the Churchill Wild stage. Always Build and its predecessor Build Films have been producing award-winning video content for Churchill Wild as far back as 2016.
Over that same period, Always Build’s broader work has taken Paetkau to Baffin Island, through the Northwest Passage aboard an icebreaker, and as far as Greenland, but the Hudson Bay coast keeps drawing him back.
Polar Bear Amid Fireweed Blooms. 2024 Photography of the Year winner. The Nature Photography Contest. Christopher Paetkau photo.
The nomination follows Paetkau’s 2024 Photography of the Year win in The Nature Photography Contest for “Polar Bear Amid Fireweed Blooms,” a haunting aerial image of a polar bear resting in a blaze of magenta fireweed along this same coastline. He described it as equal parts luck and a reminder of what we stand to lose.
Two landmark images, both born from the same wild partnership, both carrying Churchill Wild’s landscape into the conversation at the highest levels of nature photography.
Away from the tundra, Always Build has contributed footage to multiple episodes of the Emmy-nominated NBC series Wild Kingdom, including polar bear and beluga segments, as well as ongoing work with Oceans North.
Paetkau is also in post-production on a Manitoba fishing series headed for Amazon streaming, in which he stars as a self-described rookie angler learning different species from local experts.
But for now, a polar bear mother and her three improbable cubs are resting somewhere in the global imagination, thanks to a filmmaker who has spent a decade learning this coast and the guides who know it best.
Vote for “Family Rest” in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Nuveen People’s Choice Award 2026.
Voting closes March 18, 2026.
