A bird lands on the antlers of a deer in Dublin’s Phoenix Park as the rutting seasons begins.

A ruddy shelduck overtakes a flock of bar-head geese as they fly over a wetland in Nyima county, south-west China’s Tibet autonomous region.

Blooming ottelia acuminata on the Yangtze river in Du’an Yao autonomous county, China. Ottelia acuminata is an aquatic species endemic to China.

A bearded tit ( Panurus biarmicus) in Norfolk.

Endangered key deer in a puddle after Hurricane Irma in Big Pine Key, Florida.

A red fox galloping through grass on open moorland in Roberton, Scotland.

A campaigner in a badger costume outside Downing Street, London.

A colony of little red flying foxes in the Nitmiluk national park, at the mouth of Katherine Gorge in the Northern Territory, Australia. An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 little red flying foxes are calling the park home, as they follow blossoming eucalypts around the country.

A member of a guided twilight tour uses a torch to spot an eastern grey kangaroo at the Mulligans Flat nature reserve in Canberra. The reserve was established in 1995 and is home to Australian native animals such as the eastern bettong and the eastern quoll which were formerly extinct from the Australian mainland.

Ponso, the sole survivor of a colony of 20 chimpanzees, sits in a tree on Chimpanzee Island near the town of Grand Lahou, Ivory Coast. Only Ponso remains of a group of chimpanzees relocated to the island from Liberia in 1983 by a research laboratory for medical tests. An effort is under way to keep Ponso alive and well in Ivory Coast where the ape population has plummeted by 90% in two decades.

A young polar bear prepares to feast on the remains of a bowhead whale, harvested legally by whalers during their annual subsistence hunt, just outside the Inupiat village of Kaktovik, Alaska. As climate change shrinks their natural habitat, polar bears are turning Kaktovik into a sanctuary.

Flamingos fly over the Aegean during their migration period in Izmir, Turkey.

Rare giant clams in the Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef national wildlife refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in the Pacific, south of Hawaii.

A dusky moorhen at the 2017 Floriade flower show in Canberra, Australia. Floriade is celebrating its 30th anniversary and will open from 16 September to 15 October.

A pair of mating pumpkin toadlet frogs. Scientists have recently discovered that the females have lost the ability to hear the sound of the male mating calls.

A young Nubian ibex suckling from his mother near Ein Gedi at the Dead Sea, Israel.

A jaguar ambushes a giant jacare caiman on the Three Brothers River in the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The cat wrestled with the reptile for more than 20 minutes in a death struggle witnessed by photographer Chris Brunskill. Caimans form a large part of the jaguar’s diet in the Pantanal but such battles are rarely observed.

A Tiwa hunter holds a monitor lizard which he caught by using traps in West Karbi Anglong district of Assam state, India. During this time of the season, Tiwa tribesmen use different types of indigenously made traps.

Blue sheep in Qilianshan national nature reserve in north-west China’s Qinghai province.

A red admiral butterfly rests on a flower in the sunshine at Badbury Rings, Dorset, UK.

A magnificent tree frog ( Litoria splendida) which can be found in caves in Australia.