Wildlife Candid Camera

Get up close and personal with African wildlife via AWF’s camera traps—a popular technology used in ecological research and monitoring. It is also one of the methods that AWF and its partners employ when studying lesser-known species or monitoring threatened species to better protect them.

Camera traps revolutionized wildlife research because of their minimally invasive nature. Placed directly in wildlife habitats, they are remotely activated through motion or infrared sensors and record wildlife movement and behavior.

Usually, camera traps go completely undetected by wildlife because they use infrared light and no flash. They also operate continuously, allowing for around-the-clock surveillance. As a result, this technology provides unprecedented accuracy when identifying new or rare species or counting animals in an area.

According to, AWF’s Great Apes Program Director, Jef Dupain, AWF has been using these cameras in a number of ways. “In West Africa’s Parc W, we placed camera traps at strategic waterpoints so we could determine the frequency of visits by different large mammals and get a better understating of their distribution in the park in a very time-and cost-effective way.

“In the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Lomako-Yokokala Faunal Reserve, thanks to the cameras we can get better insight into the composition of the bonobo community, which is especially helpful when the animals are not yet habituated and thus difficult to observe.”

Similarly, AWF Ecologist Nakedi Maputla relied on this technology to determine the population of elusive leopard in an area just outside South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

We’re happy to share some of our camera trap videos with you, on various species pages across the site. Explore the site so you can catch a peek of Africa’s wildlife at home.

Photos: Kelly Boyer Department of Anthropology Iowa State University, Billy Dodson, Moumouni Ouedraogo