2020 Watchable Wildlife Photo Contest

Participation in the 2020 North Dakota Game and Fish Department Watchable Wildlife Photo Contest was a good reminder of the importance of our outdoors.

Even though things went seriously sideways in 2020, it’s clear by the nearly 600 photographs entered in the contest that North Dakota’s outdoors – from the badlands, to the wetlands, or simply in some back yards – played a role in providing some sense of what normal feels like.

Like last year, more photographs than typical are featured in this issue of North Dakota OUTDOORS. This adjustment is certainly a testament to the number of quality photos entered in the contest.

The contest was divided into three categories – game, nongame and plants and insects – and features a first-place photograph and eight runners-up.

The overall winning photograph in the 2020 contest is a Northern saw-whet owl taken by Daniel Mason of Fargo.

This small, yellow-eyed owl is almost entirely nocturnal, spending daylight hours roosting in dense cover. Biologists will tell you the Northern saw-whet likely got its name because one of its several calls sounds like a saw being sharpened on a whetting stone.