NEW YORK \u2014 An image of a rare hyena standing in front of an abandoned building in a former diamond mining town in Namibia has won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 award.<\/p>\n
Shot by South African photographer Wim van den Heever in the town of Kolmanskop, “Ghost Town Visitor” is the product of 10 years’ work using camera trap technology, according to a statement from the organizers on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The photograph, which was one of 60,636 entries, shows a brown hyena \u2014 a member of the rarest hyena species in the world.<\/p>\n
Nocturnal and largely solitary, brown hyenas are rarely seen, so van den Heever started to use a camera trap after noticing their tracks in the area.<\/p>\n
Kathy Moran, chair of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year jury, said that the image showed how wildlife had repopulated a town abandoned by humans.<\/p>\n
“How fitting that this photograph was made in a ghost town,” she said in the statement.<\/p>\n
“You get a prickly feeling just looking at this image, and you know that you’re in this hyena’s realm.”<\/p>\n
Jury member Akanksha Sood Singh added that the “image is an eerie juxtaposition of the wild reclaiming human civilization.”<\/p>\n
“The image is haunting yet mesmerizing because the solitary hyena takes center stage as a symbol of resilience amid the decay,” she said.<\/p>\n
The image is haunting yet mesmerizing because the solitary hyena takes center stage as a symbol of resilience amid the decay.\u2013Akanksha Sood Singh, jury member<\/p>\n
Italian photographer Andrea Dominizi won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025, for entrants aged 17 and under, with his image of a longhorn beetle that appears to be surveying abandoned logging machinery.<\/p>\n
Named “After the Destruction,” Dominizi took the photograph in the Lepini Mountains in central Italy, which were once a source of old beech trees.<\/p>\n
“A compelling, but harrowing photograph, it’s one that encourages the viewer to contemplate the nature of this fraught relationship,” said jury member Andy Parkinson of Dominizi’s picture.<\/p>\n
The award organizers also highlighted the Impact Award, which was won by Brazilian photographer Fernando Faciole for his image of an orphaned giant anteater pup following a human caregiver.<\/p>\n
In addition, the jury selected 19 category winners. These images will feature in an exhibition that will open at the Natural History Museum in London on Friday.<\/p>\n
“Now in its sixty-first year, we are thrilled to continue Wildlife Photographer of the Year as a powerful platform for visual storytelling, showing the diversity, beauty and complexity of the natural world and humanity’s relationship to it,” said museum director Doug Gurr in the statement.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 An image of a rare hyena standing in front of an abandoned building in a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":307999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3425,1037,419,418,421,420,425,1759,50,3092,422,423,159,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-307998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-cars","11":"tag-classifieds","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-local","15":"tag-nature","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-photography","18":"tag-radio","19":"tag-salt-lake","20":"tag-science","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-utah","28":"tag-weather","29":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115383785544768548","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}