A “haunting” image of a hyena in a mining ghost town that took a decade to capture has won this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.
The shot was selected out of a record-breaking 60,636 images submitted to this year's competition. The image, taken by the South African wildlife photographer Wim van den Heever, shows a rarely seen brown hyena, the world’s rarest hyena species, next to a dilapidated building in the long-abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop, Namibia.
Mr Van den Heever said it took him 10 years to capture the single image of a brown hyena in a perfect frame, and said he was “ecstatic” when he managed it. The image also won the Urban Wildlife Category of the contest.
Kathy Moran, chairwoman of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year jury, said: “You get a prickly feeling just looking at this image and you know that you’re in this hyena’s realm. I also love the twist on this interpretation of ‘urban’ – it was once but is no longer a human-dominated environment.
“Abandoned by miners, wildlife has taken over. Repopulated, if you will. Is it still a town? It would seem that way to me, just no longer ours.”
The competition’s Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year prize was won by the Italian Andrea Dominizi, who secured the top award for his “harrowing” shot of habitat loss in the Lepini Mountains of central Italy.
His image “after the destruction” spotlights a longhorn beetle, a vital element of the ecosystem, framed by abandoned machinery in an area once logged for old beach trees.
