A wild dog catches a wildebeest: Jonathan Scott’s best photograph

‘I followed the hunt from a distance with my knee on the steering wheel – focusing manually while trying not to hit an anthill or go down a warthog burrow’

My wife Angie and I have spent much of our careers as photographers focusing on big cats in the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, but when each of us won Wildlife Photographer of the Year it was with pictures of different species. Angie’s winner was of elephants looking at a heron. Mine was this, which was taken in 1987, before Angie and I met. Having lived for over a decade in Africa, and published books about lions and leopards, I’d travelled down to the Serengeti to work on one about the great migration, keen to see what the wildebeest do during the wet season. While there, I realised there was also a story to be told about the wild dogs that make dens on the southern plains at that time, when food is most plentiful, as they’re raising their puppies.

It took me six years to get all the pictures I needed for my book The Leopard’s Tale – they are extremely difficult animals to photograph. So I loved the contrast of switching to the most social carnivore and pack-hunting of animals. I’d got permission to live in my car for weeks, even months, at a time – which meant I could follow the wild dogs without having to travel back and forth. I was at the den 24/7.

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