First Friends

African wild dogs are my favourite animal of all, so this photograph means more to me than almost anything else I've taken. It was shot at a den site in Khwai, in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, where a pack had settled to raise a litter of pups - these two were just six weeks old, all energy and curiosity.

We arrived early in the morning to find the alpha male alone at the den with the pups, the rest of the pack out hunting. He had the look of an animal simply waiting, lying low and conserving energy, while the pups ignored him entirely and got on with the business of being pups. We stayed with them most of the morning, but the rest of the pack never returned, which likely meant the hunt had failed and they'd stayed out to try again elsewhere.

What happened later that same day made this photograph even more special. As the sun began to set, completely without warning, a wild dog darted across the road directly in front of our vehicle, and the bush exploded into chaos. Seven dogs in total, scattering a herd of impala, alarm calls going up from every species. For a frantic twenty minutes we tried to keep pace as the herd split and scattered and the dogs split with them. Our guide, Steve Stockhall (Earth Ark Travel), predicted the dogs would push their target toward the water, and he couldn't have been more right. By the time we reached the riverbank, two dogs had already brought down a male impala, and the rest of the pack arrived shortly after to join the feast. Knowing, looking at this image of these tiny pups biting each other, that they would grow up to belong in a pack capable of that kind of coordinated, ruthless hunting, is part of what makes wild dogs so endlessly fascinating to me.

This image is also inspired by Steve Stockhall, with his iconic overexposed imagery, with a white-out background.