South African wildlife photographer Wim van den Heever was announced as the Natural History Museum London's Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 for his photograph of a hyena at an abandoned town in Namibia.

Titled "Ghost Town Visitor," the striking image shows the brown hyena standing amidst the rubble in the long-abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop in Namibia as a damaged house looms in the background. The single shot, which took Heever a decade to get after first noticing their tracks at the site, was captured using camera trap technology, according to the museum.

The "rarest hyena species in the world," according to the museum, "brown hyenas are nocturnal and mostly solitary." The animal's population is estimated to be between 4,000 and 10,000 in the wild, and they ar

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