For the First Time in The Wild, A Rare African Okapi is Photographed

A motion-triggered jungle camera has snapped the first-ever pictures of a wild African okapi, close kin to the giraffe. The Zoological Society of London, in cooperation with the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation, captured the photographs in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park. While the animals can be found in European and North American zoos, sightings in the wild are extremely rare. That’s partly because the creature — which has the black tongue of a giraffe and the striped hindquarters of a zebra — is shy and elusive, and partly because it is threatened by poachers and civil war in the region. Okapi meat is regularly sold in the town of Beni, near the park. If illegal hunting continues at the current rate, the Zoological Society warns, the area’s okapi could be extinct in a few years.