Home Sweet Home

The Maasai Mara is a vast and beautiful place. I get the same feeling from the endless golden grasses that I do from staring at a huge body of water: that sense of awe and reminder of my own insignificance.

We biologists aren’t here in the Mara to appreciate its beauty, however. We’re here to find hyenas. And when the view from the car most days looks a little something like this:

Grass, grass and more grass. 

…our job can be somewhat difficult. Fortunately for us, hyenas are social creatures and often gather at the communal dens where all the mothers keep their current cubs. When we know where the den is, we usually need only to drive there and we’ll be sure to find at least a few hyenas socializing, playing with cubs or grabbing a quick nap in a shady spot. Unfortunately for us, hyenas are also prone to moving their communal dens without warning and not bothering to leave us a forwarding address.

For most of my month in Serena Camp, we were unable to find the communal den of one of our three study clans, South Clan. Every observation session in South territory became a three-hour-long game of Where’s Waldo, only if Waldo was lower to the ground, the exact same color as the surrounding landscape, and very good at hiding in tall grass, rock fields, and clumps of bushes that our cars can’t drive through.

In times like these we rely on our radio tracking equipment. Several of our hyenas in each clan are fitted with some very fashionable collars, like so:

Taj Mahal, sporting her lovely jewelry. 

Armed with a couple fancy antennas, a giant pair of headphones and a radio receiver, we can track the signals broadcast by their collars and hopefully reduce the amount of time we spend driving around the Mara staring at grass.

One of our cars with the aforementioned fancy antennas.

In particular, we tend to collar females with young cubs because they are the most likely to spend a lot of time at the communal den with their cubs. If the clan decides to pack up and move camp, we should be able to track one of the mothers straight to the new den. In South Clan, however, none of our collared females have young cubs at the moment so our tracking usually led us to the collar-wearer standing around by herself. Not very exciting.

But on one fortuitous occasion, we didn’t need tracking at all. In the distance we happened to spot several hyenas standing around a mound. Then we got very lucky: one of those hyenas happened to have a young cub who popped out of a hole in the ground as we approached and began to nurse.

Clovis and the newest South Clan member, Wasabi!

Because we were very VERY lucky, several other South females happened to have cubs as well. Lo and behold, we’d found the new South den!

You have no idea how happy we are to meet you, cubs!

We have a den full of new cubs to watch, a meeting spot for the clan’s adults, and no need to view the empty, hyena-less plains with dread any longer. With special thanks to Clovis and her new cub Wasabi for tipping us off, we are happy hyena researchers once again!