The story behind the award-winning photo of an elusive brown hyena bringing new life to the Namib Desert.

At night, the long-abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop is almost empty. The tourists who visit this early 20th-Century settlement near Namibia's Atlantic Coast for its sand-filled buildings have all gone back to their accommodation for the night. But there is still some movement in the deserted streets. Between the shadowy wrecked buildings and alleyways half submerged in sand, there is the skulking form of a lone brown hyena.

A bright flash illuminates the scene – and marks the culmination of 10 years of work for the South African wildlife photographer Wim van den Heever.

It's the shot that won the grand title at this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year, run by the Natural History Museum in London. It's an intriguing image not just for its composition, but for its subject too. The brown hyena is the rarest species of hyena in the world. It is also a remarkably adaptive and opportunistic animal, which has adopted Namibia's abandoned diamond towns as its own. (You can see the other winners of the competition here.)

Van den Heever runs nature photography tours around the world and returns to the Namib Desert once a year. During his initial visits, he became convinced that a brown hyena was roaming the ghost town at night. "I would see either droppings or tracks of a hyena in the area," he says. He soon had the idea of photographing the hyena in the striking setting of the ghost town.

After trying several different approaches, Van den Heever settled on waking between 02:00-03:00 to return to Kolmanskop to set up his camera trap while the town was entirely empty. Capturing the shot, however, was exceptionally difficult. The brown hyena is a shy animal, mainly active at night. For years, Van den Heever would only catch a glimpse of one far in the distance from the town, often running in the opposite direction.

Added to that was the daunting environment of the Namib Desert. Easterly winds brought sands that would pile up a metre (3.3ft) high against his photography equipment in the night. "I had one or two years where cameras just got absolutely trashed," he says. When a westerly wind was blowing in off the ocean, it brought thick banks of fog. "Then even if there's a hyena in your picture, you can't see it, because the fog's just too thick."

Finally, there was the question of where to put the camera trap. Van den Heever imagined the route a hyena might take while roaming through the abandoned town. "I always had in my mind that if something's going to walk from this direction to this direction, it'll have to come through this plane," says Van den Heever. "And if I can time it correctly, I can........

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