A motorcycle sits at the site of a destroyed home after the Soberanes Fire burned through the Palo Colorado area, north of Big Sur, California, July 31, 2016. (Photo by Michael Fiala/Reuters)

A Tufted Capuchin sits in a hanging food tray on a tree in it's enclosure at Sydney Zoo on February 24, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. Sydney Zoo, located at Bungarribee Park in Western Sydney, is the first new zoo to be built in Sydney in more than 100 years. The Zoo opened to the public on 7 December 2019. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

A giraffe was captured creating a dust cloud while running in front of a perfect African sunset in Amboseli National Park, Kenya in the first decade of November 2022. (Photo by Edgard Berben/Media Drum Images)

English actress Liz Hurley, 55, poses topless in the snow in a photo taken by her son in United Kingdom at the end of January 2021. Brit stripped to white bikini bottoms from her own swimwear range and draped herself in a coat. (Photo by Instagram/The Sun)

“Eye of a toad”. Animal Portraits, Łukasz Bożycki, Poland. Early spring sees a pond near Łukasz’s home city of Warsaw, Poland, full of mating frogs and a few toads. On this March day, Łukasz shared the pond with them for an evening, sitting in the icy water in his chest-high waders, keeping as still as possible, despite the numbing cold, so that the amphibians could get used to him. “I wanted to find a fresh way of portraying the amphibians”, he says, “at water level”. Using a telephoto lens, he focused on one lone toad and waited for the sun to dip almost below the horizon before pressing the shutter, using flash to bring out the details in the shadow. His prize was “the glorious pool of sunset colour” and fiery glow of the toad’s eye. Nikon D80 + 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 lens + extension tube; 1/125 sec at f9 (-2.3 e/v); ISO 100; built-in flash. (Photo by Łukasz Bożycki)

Carved pumpkins designed by US pumpkin artist Ray Villafane are pictured during a pumpkin exhibition in Ludwigsburg, southern Germany, on September 8, 2017. (Photo by Sebastian Gollnow/AFP Photo/DPA)

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)