Off we went to the Natural History Museum on our annual pilgrimage to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, now 50 years young. This time with my three-year-old son, whose obsession with animals, manifest both in the volume of his toy creatures and propensity to imaginatively morph into a wide variety of species daylong, shows no signs of waning.

After extricating the boy from the stuffed swan family at the exhibition entrance, we traversed the spell-binding images, large illuminated panels displaying finalists and winners in categories including mammals, reptiles and amphibians, plant life, landscapes, water creatures, and a section for looking at nature in new ways.

I liked the bird pictures, including ghostly pelicans at dusk and a hummingbird with a bizarrely long beak, and those by the young photographers, such impressive talent! My son’s favourite animal is the wildebeest, which was luckily featured a few times, including backlit by fire. He also liked the mouse with big whiskers on a rock illuminated by the moon, as reminiscent of The Gruffalo’s Child.

I whisked him past the essay section (this year on big game hunting), “Mama why is the lion in a cage?”, and plonked him in front of the slideshow of highlights from the competition’s past 50 years. A grand day out!

Images courtesy of Darren Shaw on Flickr and Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2014. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is co-owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide.