Nikon and Canon Photographers scooped up most of the wildlife awards.

Okapi001 wrote:

Wu Jiaqiu wrote

which asks the question....why do they mostly use Canon/Nikon?

Tradition and vendor lock-in are significant factors.

Let's look at the situation some 40+ years ago. A lot of wildlife photographers had Olympus OM-1/2/4. By the year 2000 virtually all of them switched to another brand, due to the fact that Olympus basically skiped the autofocus phase of film photography.

There were also Pentax and Minolta, popular in general, but for various reasons not so much among wildlife photographers.

So most of the wildlife photographers were using Canon or Nikon, which continued in the digital era. Only recently Sony, Olympus and Panasonic have cameras and lenses that can potentially atract serious wildlife photographers, and it seems especially Olympus is doing quite well in that regard.

A good friend of mine and a great wildlife photographer has been using Canon for 40+ years. Recently he admited that in his opinion Sony is better (for wildlife photography), but he is too invested in Canon to switch.

It should also be mentioned that the difference between major brands (or formats) is in most cases not that big to justify major costs associated with switching systems. But despite that we see some serious Canon and Nikon users switching to Olympus (or Sony or Panasonic).

most people i know have spent so much on big lenses they have no intention of selling and rebuying everything just for another format to get basically where they were