NORTHAMPTON — On a spring day in 2020 as he returned home from a morning of birding along the Mill River, James Lowenthal stopped to chat with a neighbor just a few doors from his Crescent Street home.

As the neighbors talked, they noticed a mama opossum lurch slowly across a nearby lawn, off the curb, under a car, out into the road, up the other curb, and off across another lawn into the bushes — all with her eight babies clinging to her fur.

“She was so heavily laden she could barely walk, one slow step at a time,” Lowenthal said in an email recalling the encounter on May 24 of that year.

Given that he was still carrying his camera and telephoto lens, Lowenthal snapped over 50 pictures of that opossum family in the course of three minutes.

He then entered the photo in Mass Audubon’s annual statewide photo contest called “Picture This: Your Great Outdoors,” and in 2023 it was selected for an honorable mention award. More than 5,000 images were submitted by hundreds of photographers of varied abilities from across the commonwealth and beyond.

“I know some people think opossums are creepy and rat-like with their hairless tails,” Lowenthal wrote. “I think they’re adorable and helpless and vulnerable, and none more so than this family. Plus they eat lots of ticks, so if anything we should be grateful for their presence among us.”

He adds that opossums are mostly nocturnal and, like all creatures, need darkness at night to thrive, which he says is another reason to curb “lighting everything up at night.” Lowenthal is a longtime advocate for reduced light pollution at night.

Lowenthal is one of eight people to earn an honorable mention in the Mass Audubon competition, which comes with a $50 gift card to a Mass Audubon shop or wildlife sanctuary. All photos must have been taken in Massachusetts or at Mass Audubon’s Wildwood Camp in Rindge, New Hampshire, but may have been shot any time prior to or during the 2023 contest period.

The grand prize went to Cheryl Rose of Hopkinton, who submitted an image of a colorful and carnivorous Sundew plant. Beautiful but deadly, but only to insects trapped by the “flypaper plant’s” sticky dew-drop-shaped glands, Sundews can be found in many Massachusetts wetlands.

A slideshow of all winners and honorable mentions can be found at massaudubon.org/photocontest.