Shy dik-dik

Shy sprinter

It took the help of a telephoto lens to capture this little antelope's extreme close-up. (You can tell by the photo's stark depth of field—notice the crisp focus on the eyes that turns soft toward the nose.) Tiny in stature, the Kirk's dik-dik survives on supreme skittishness, hiding away in scrubby thickets from predators and photographers alike. When a female dik-dik is startled, it'll take off like a shot in a zigzagging, 25-mile-per-hour sprint, chattering warnings to its fellows with an onomatopoeic shout of 'dik-dik-dik.' Kirk's dik-dik is split into two populations in eastern and southwestern Africa—this west-coaster was spotted in the wilds of Namibia in its habitat along the Fish River.