Okapi photographed in the wild for the first time

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Uh... The composition is a little poor, the okapi would look better if it was centered in the picture. It would have been nice if the photographer could have got the okapi to smile too. Still way cute though.

By Oscar Zoalaster (not verified) on 10 Sep 2008 #permalink

It's not the the first okapi filmed in the wild since I've seen a documentary that's over 20 years old with okapis being trapped and released.

Sloppy journalism. Lipstick on a pig :-)

Even beyond David's comment, the first photograph taken of an okapi in the wild was taken no later than 1907 (the year it was announced in Nature). See my post for details.

I think they meant, it was the first time a "British Team" ever photographed an okapi. If not, the title is incorrect. It's funny how they labeled their camera positions as "traps." The okapi is a beautiful animal.

No, what they meant was this is the first time an okapi has been photographed in the wild. Obviously this also means "to their knowledge and never published" - if someone took a picture 50 years ago and put it in his photo album and forgot about it no-one would know would they? For all of the people saying that they have seen photos of wild okapi, the chances are that they have seen okapi at the old Belgian capture station at Epulu, Ituri, which is still there and houses 12 okapi. And please, be realistic, the Congo rainforests are very dense and the okapi very shy so the chances of someone taking a picture of one with 1907 technology is ridiculously small. As for the video comment, they trap an okapi by digging a pit, covering it and leaving it so how did they manage to film the okapi getting trapped? Like many wildlife documentaries, this was a set-up, also at Epulu.
And they didn't choose the word "trap", that's what "camera traps" are called.
It's funny that John Hart, the world respected naturalist who's worked in Congo for more than 30 years and the only person to do any real studies of okapi (along with his wife Therese), agrees that this is the first wild picture? Obviously the armchair internet naturalists know better...
Why do people have to be so pathetic and nit-picking (especially when they don't have the facts), why can't you just be positive and happy that okapi still exist in semliki?