It took ten years for Wim van den Heever to capture his perfect shot. After noticing paw prints and scat in an abandoned mining town along the coast of southern Namibia, he saw an opportunity to snap a picture of a brown hyena, the rarest hyena in the world. Amid fog drifting in from the Atlantic Ocean, he set up his camera trap and waited. And waited.
Van den Heever's patience and perseverance rewarded him with a striking, ghostly portrait of a brown hyena "in the most perfect frame imaginable," gazing into the night beside the skeletal remains of a long-abandoned building. The photograph, 'Ghost Town Visitor', earned him the prestigious title of 61st Wildlife Photographer of the Year, awarded today by London's Natural History Museum.
The photograph is an "eerie juxtaposition of the wild reclaiming human civilization," said competition judge Akanksha Sood Singh in a press release. "This picture is a multi-layered story of loss, resilience and the natural world's silent triumph, making it an unforgettable piece of wildlife and conservation photography."
How this year's winner got the shot
Nocturnal and solitary, brown hyenas are rarely seen and not an easily persuaded subject for a photograph. Yet they are known to travel through Kolmanskop, a crumbling former diamond mining settlement, as they head to the coast of the Namib Desert in search of fur seal pups and washed-up carrion.
Realizing these hyenas were too elusive to capture in person, van den Heever used camera traps to photograph them remotely. This brought a new set of challenges -- from lighting to false triggers, to huge dumps of sand blowing in from the desert. Ten years after first conceiving of the photo and after many disappointing results, he'd finally got his shot. "Can I say I was doing cartwheels?", says van den Heever. "I was extremely, extremely happy, I couldn't believe it."
For the photographer, the picture holds a simple message: wildlife isn't separate or distant from us. "Even in our cities and urban environments, nature finds its way to live alongside us, and coexistence is possible if we are willing to embrace it," he says. "That's basically the story I'm trying to tell."
Contest winners spotlight wildlife threats
This year's competition received a record-breaking 60,636 entries from 113 countries and territories. In addition to awarding one grand prize, the competition bestows 18 additional awards to photos that highlight wildlife.
Brazilian photographer and National Geographic Explorer Fernando Faciole won this year's Impact Award with 'Orphan of the Road', a heartbreaking image of a giant anteater pup -- orphaned through a road collision -- trailing its caregiver after an evening feed at a rehabilitation center. After developing survival skills, the pup will be released back into the wild.
In 'End of the Round-up', Spanish photojournalist Javier Aznar González de Rueda's portfolio depicts the complex relationship between humans and rattlesnakes in the United States. González de Rueda hoped to inspire protection for these snakes -- at once demonized and studied for cutting edge medicine -- and which are disappearing from the American landscape. The photos, and the story they tell, earned Rueda the photojournalist award.
(See more of Rueda's photos documenting American rattlesnakes here.)
While many of the contest categories highlight one photo, the Portfolio Award goes to a photographer's larger body of work. This year, that award went to self-taught photographer Alexey Kharitonov, whose portfolio of drone photos documented the mesmerizing details in the sprawling, remote terrains of the Russian North, Siberia, and Asia. Two shots, 'Ice Motifs' and 'Taiga Moon', show a frozen lake and a grassy mound encircled by ice, pine trees, and sphagnum moss.
Aside from recognizing awe-inspiring images from more established entrants, the contest also reserves awards for young wildlife photographers.
Winner of the Rising Star Award -- awarded to up-and-coming photographers between ages 18 to 26 -- was German photographer Luca Lorenz for his photo of a cheeky coypu stealing the spotlight from mute swans gliding across an urban lake in Germany. Copyu were shipped from South America to Europe for the fur trade and have established populations around the world.
The Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, ages 15-17, went to Andrea Dominizi who spotted a longhorn beetle resting in a stand of Italy's Lepini Mountains that was once logged for beech trees. Framed against now abandoned machinery, 'After the Destruction' explores the notion of habitat loss.
Many of this year's award-winning photographs tell stories about the many ways wildlife are now battling for existence.
In a first for the competition, this year's award-winning photographs will be exhibited next to the Natural History Museum's Biodiversity Intactness Index. The metric reveals how much original biodiversity remains in an area and helps track international progress towards conservation goals. The inclusion of the index will give visitors insights into how the planet's habitats are changing in response to human pressures and is particularly timely given current rates of species decline around the world.
Many contest winners have spent years documenting the loss of Earth's biodiversity, and they will continue to do so.
After briefly swapping his photographer gear for a tuxedo to attend the contest award ceremony on October 14, van den Heever is now heading off to the Falkland Islands -- a remote and relatively pristine part of the world -- in search of new subjects, including penguins, elephant seals, sea lions, and the black-browed albatross. "It's one of the most beautiful places, and one of the places where you can truly experience freedom."