Overview
- South African photographer Wim van den Heever won the top prize for Ghost Town Visitor, a brown hyena photographed at night in the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop, Namibia.
- The winning hyena image also secured first place in the competition’s Urban Wildlife category, highlighting wildlife reclaiming human-built spaces.
- Seventeen-year-old Italian Andrea Dominizi earned Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year for Dopo la distruzione, featuring a Morimus asper beetle in the Monti Lepini with logging machinery blurred in the background.
- The 61st edition received more than 60,600 entries from 113 countries, with 100 winning images due to go on display at London’s Natural History Museum from 17 October.
- Judges praised curiosity, patience, talent, perseverance in van den Heever’s decade-long effort and said Dominizi’s photo conveys both human-driven loss and resilience, with other honorees including conservation-focused work such as a non-viable northern white rhino fetus.