Injuries and Survival

Hyenas are tough, way tough. We’ve all heard stories about such and such hyena that recovered from such and such terrible injury, but I had never seen it before until Moon Pie.

Moon Pie has always been a pretty solitary hyena. She’s relatively low ranking and most times we track her she is sacked out. She also manages to look more like a rock than any other hyena I’ve met yet. We have been tracking her and driven up to rocks that we think are her and passed by her thinking she’s a rock. Multiple times. It’s quite embarrassing.

One day, we tracked Moon Pie and found her sacked out, as usual. We didn’t drive too close due to her being sacked out in a swampy area. When she lifted up her head I started laughing immediately. It looked as if she was making some sort of silly face and I couldn’t imagine why she was doing that. But, at the time we didn’t think too much off it. We really did think that she was just kind of sticking her tongue out at us.

A few days later we tracked her again. This time we got a little closer and were surprised to see that she was still making that same silly face. But it wasn’t a face that she was making. It was just her face. It looked like someone had punched her with a concrete block. The left side of her face was completely swollen, her jaw was out of alignment and a few of her teeth appeared to have been broken or had fallen out.

We were pretty sure that she was not going to make it. We tracked her whenever we could for a week or two and any time we saw her she was sacked out and not really moving but, she always seemed alert. And then the swelling started to go down. And then we saw her moving around. And then we saw her chewing a bit. She still doesn’t look great by any standards. Her jaw is still out of alignment, her cheek looks painful, she has lost quite a few teeth, and those she hasn’t are perpendicular to the direction they should be pointing. But, she’s up and about, feeding, and pooping so it looks like she’s going to survive this one.