Award winning photo of Widowed Penguins

Mr Baumgaertner was able to catch the moment having spent three nights observing a colony of penguins. It was apparently particularly challenging to get the right shot.

St Kilda in Melbourne has a colony of over a thousand fairy penguins. This is the smallest type of penguin species with an average height of just 33cm.

The photographer said in his post on Instagram: “These two fairy penguins poised upon a rock overlooking the Melbourne skyline were standing there for hours, flipper in flipper,”

He added that a volunteer approached him to say that one was “an elderly lady who had lost her partner” and the other was a “younger male” who had also been bereaved.