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Photographer Wim van den Heever scans images captured by a camera trap that can be triggered by movement. The dilapidated skeleton of an abandoned building is exposed in Kolmanskop, Namibia. Once a vibrant mining village, it has long since become a ghost town.
What you can see has no soul.
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Another trigger. The same eerie, yet ultimately desolate, misty nightscape stares at South Africans almost mockingly.
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The trap is set for the third and final time. Van den Heever stares dumbfounded into the obsidian eyes of an animal rarely seen by humans, and sees in them the image he formed in his head ten years ago materializing.
Since Van den Heever won the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award for this photo last October, more people have witnessed the ghostly appearance of the brown hyena, the rarest of the four hyena species.
“Literally thousands of people…almost hundreds of thousands of people have contacted me on social media,” Van den Heever told CNN.
“I can’t reply to everyone, but it was a lot of fun.”
Beating out 60,635 other entries for the Natural History Museum’s annual prize, ‘Ghost Town Visitor’ was hailed by the judges as a ‘haunting yet captivating’ shot that tells a story of both ‘loss’ and ‘resilience’.
Resilience was the basis of the photographer’s difficult journey to photograph the figurative beluga whale.
Inheriting his father’s passion for wildlife photography, van den Heever, who organizes wildlife and nature photography tours around the world, came up with the idea for his award-winning photos during his first visit to Kolmanskop 10 years ago.
It was closed to the public in 1908 following the discovery of vast diamond deposits, but within four years a bustling town with a butcher, bakery and post office had sprung up on the southern coast of the Namib Desert.
But by the late 1950s, the neighborhood’s riches had long been plundered, and the property was frequented not by prospectors but by desert dunes and sometimes an elusive type of scavenger.
The brown hyena, classified as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has an estimated population of 4,000 to 10,000 individuals in the wild, with a few having since settled in Kolmanskop.
Natalie Cooper, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum, said in a press release that the town’s remote nature and the potential windbreak provided by the ruined structures made it an “ideal” location for a burrow.
Van de Heever’s creative engine started revving as soon as he spotted footprints in the sand near a building. He visualized a dream picture: a structure on the left and a hyena on the right.
“I created this scene in my head,” he explained. “I had been planning that all along. I wanted that particular moment to stay that way.”
The problem, he quickly realized, was capturing it.
After spending many dusk and dawn wandering around Kolmanskop with his camera in hand, Van den Heever admitted that a change in strategy was needed if he was to record the animals, which, according to local guards, only pass through the area once every six weeks.
Camera traps provided a path to success, but they did not guarantee it. The focal length and lighting challenges were complicated by the presence of nearby security lights, and were further exacerbated by the need to accurately predict the hyena’s arrival route into frame.
With two radio-triggered flashes placed on either side, a miscalculation of just a few inches could illuminate the back of the animal instead of the front, potentially ruining the composition of the image.
“The hyenas had to reach exactly the right location,” said van den Heever, who visits Kolmanskop once every 10 years to photograph the hyenas. “Not one meter (three feet) away, not one meter in front of you, but right there.”
“It took a lot of time, a lot of frustration, and I had very little to show for it. There’s one photo I’d like to show you, but that’s really the only one.”
But all those painstaking hours, not to mention the loss of equipment to damage from the desert elements, were all worth it on that fateful night when Van den Heever saw the camera working for the third time.
“I knew right away that this was the shot I’d been chasing for the last 10 years. This was the moment I knew this was it,” he recalled.
“There was fog rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean, which gave the scene an eerie atmosphere. That’s what made some of the pictures so beautiful.”
Van den Heever, equally keen to highlight the endearing aspects of environmentally important species that he feels are treated harshly in the court of public opinion, was completely reluctant to take part in the coveted annual competition.
He explained that hyenas were given a “bad reputation” after they were portrayed as scheming and cunning in Disney’s 1994 animated classic “The Lion King.”
“I had no idea they would choose a photo of a brown hyena because of its negative connotations, and I didn’t even care if there was a hyena in it,” Van den Heever admitted.
“So it was really nice for me that this year’s best picture was a brown hyena, so people could suddenly see that they’re not that bad, they’re cool animals.
“We need to protect them and take care of them because they deserve a spot.”
Van den Heever, who already has a goal of one day photographing hyenas roaming around the Colman Shop building, hopes his award will spur new appreciation for the animal kingdom’s less-loved creatures.
“There are some other species that are similar, species that are very elusive, very shy, and really difficult to get great photos of, but these also deserve some sunshine,” he said.
