Brown Hyena

The brown hyena is the animal you are least likely to see on this list, and the one worth wanting most. There may be fewer than ten thousand left on Earth, and this coast is their stronghold.

It almost never kills. It inherits, walking the tide line between seal colonies at night, thirty kilometres and more, alone, taking what the sea and the jackals have finished with. The coat is long and dark and blows sideways in the wind off the Atlantic, so that at a distance, caught in headlights, it does not read as a hyena at all. It reads as something wearing a cloak. By day it is gone, into brush and old aardvark burrows.

We hold no occurrence records for it anywhere we map. That is not absence. It is a measure of how few people are on that road at three in the morning, and of how completely this animal has arranged its life around not being seen.

If you go looking, take the coast road near a colony before first light, keep the ISO high and your expectations low, and shoot from where you stopped.