A girl peers from between light decorations at a Christmas fair which opened ahead of the holiday season in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, November 25, 2022. Municipal authorities in the Romanian capital, quoted by local media, stated that holiday season city light decoration levels will remain at last year's level and use energy saving solutions. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)

“Scott Linstead is an internationally published, freelance wildlife photographer/writer. His clients include Natural History Magazine, Hewlett Packard, Ranger Rick Magazine and a number of wildlife publications in North America and Europe. Scott's column on the techniques of bird photography appears in every issue of Outdoor Photography Canada”.

Photo: A veiled chameleon extends its tongue to catch a cricket. Canadian wildlife photographer Scott Linstead, formerly an aerospace engineer and high school teacher, uses a device called Phototrap “to not only photograph the elusive, but also the unimaginably quick”. (Photo by Scott Linstead)

A dramatic rise in owning exotic pets in China is fuelling global demand for threatened species. The growing trade in alligators, snakes, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders is directly linked to species loss in some of the world’s most threatened ecosystems. Here: A fennec fox (Vulpes zerda) is groomed in a pet store in central Beijing. Native to the Sahara in North Africa, the species became a popular pet after being depicted as a character in Disney’s 2016 animated movie Zootopia. Individuals can cost between $2,000–$3,000. (Photo by Sean Gallagher/The Guardian)

Marine biologist Simon Pierce, who studies whale sharks, happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture amazing photo off Cancun, Mexico. (Photo by Simon Pierce/Mercury Press/Caters News)

Undated BBC handout photo of a female two-coloured Mason Bee carrying a dried grass stalk back to her snail-shell nest on the British Isles in the latest episode of Sir David Attenborough's Wild Isles series. Issue date: Sunday March 26, 2023. (Photo by John Walters/Silverback Films/BBC/PA Wire)

A Buddhist monk salvages a statue of a Buddhist deity from a monastery around the famous Swayambhunath stupa after it was damaged by Saturday's earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal, Thursday, April 30, 2015. In mere seconds, Saturday's earthquake devastated a swathe of Nepal. Three of the seven World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley have been severely damaged, including Durbar Square with pagodas and temples dating from the 15th to 18th centuries, according to UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency. (Photo by Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Alfred the frog looks almost as scary as the pumpkin he is perched on at London Zoo 26 October 2011. Keepers at the zoo have joined in the Halloween tradition by supplying pumpkin lunches to some of their animals, including the giant waxy monkey frog. However Alfred is not quite the giant figure his species name suggests – he actually measures up at around 4 inches (10 centimeters). (Photo by EPA/Zoological Society of London)

Police memebers stand guard as a group of women protest in front of the police headquarters after knowing that the body of María Belen Bernal was found murdered in a police officers' school and which main suspect – Bernal's husband police lieutenant German Caceres – is at large, in northern Quito, on October 1st, 2022. According to the prosecutor's office, at least 573 femicides have been registered in Ecuador's population of 17.7 million since 2014. In the first months of 2022 there had been 206 murders of women, according to Geraldine Guerra from the Aldea NGO that tracks femicides in the country. (Photo by Rodrigo Buendia/AFP Photo)