As the nights lengthen, strange creatures emerge from the darkness, none more haunting than the rare brown hyena captured in a mining ghost town. This eerie image, showing the predator by an abandoned building in Namibia’s former diamond-mining hub of Kolmanskop, took Wim van den Heever 10 years to perfect using camera-trap technology.
His patience was rewarded when the South African photographer was named Wildlife Photographer of the Year for his shot, “Ghost Town Visitor,” which also triumphed in the urban wildlife category. Competition chairwoman Kathy Moran remarked on the image’s power: “You get a prickly feeling just looking at this image…you know that you’re in this hyena’s realm.”
Van den Heever’s winning entry was selected from a record 60,636 submissions to the prestigious competition, organized by the Natural History Museum, London.
Other captivating entries with a Halloween theme included Simone Baumeister’s “Caught in the Headlights,” a kaleidoscopic view of an orb weaver spider in its web on a footbridge, distorted by car lights below. The German photographer achieved this effect by reversing one of the analogue lens’s glass elements.
Among other notable winners, “After the Destruction” by Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year Andrea Dominizi shows a longhorn beetle seemingly observing a digger in Italy’s Lepini Mountains. Audun Rikardsen from Norway captured an Atlantic fishing vessel besieged by hungry birds during a polar night in northern Norway. Finally, Fernando Faciole’s image depicts an orphaned giant anteater pup following its carer at a rehabilitation centre in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.