Grand prize winner is Kim Steininger of Chads Forge, PA. "I took this picture right before I ducked," says Steininger. On a bird-watching trip in Ontario, Canada, last winter, the network administrator noticed that one of the great gray owls she was photographing was staring back at her. "I didn't think anything of it until it started flying at me," she says. Before getting out of the way, Steininger captured this digital photo with a 500mm telephoto lens.

Victor S. Lamoureux of Vestal, New York: Lamoureux, a high school biology teacher, knows frogs. So when he went frog-watching with his son and niece at a nearby pond and spotted two male green frogs clinging to each other, he knew it was something unusual. Then my son said, "Dad, Dad, look-there are three frogs!" says Lamoureux. As it turned out, there actually were four: three males in a conga line behind one put-upon female. Lamoureux raced back to his house with the kids in tow, and returned to take this digital image with a 180mm macro lens.

Ray G. Foster of Salem, Oregon: Ducks, not hummingbirds, were on Foster's mind when he settled down behind a photo blind near a pond in southern Oregon. "I wasn't having any duck luck so I decided to focus on this hummingbird," says the paper mill worker. He used a 300mm lens to take this unusual photo of a rufous hummingbird collecting fibers from a cattail--presumably to build a nest.

Kevin Doxstater of Port Orange, Florida: While photographing water birds in Florida's Fort DeSoto Park, Doxstater spotted a long-billed curlew hundreds of feet away in the middle of a tidal marsh. Doxstater took off his socks and shoes and slowly waded into the marsh, making digital photos along the way using a 500mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter. In the end, he was rewarded with this close-up shot of the curlew in the middle of a crab lunch.