Video from BBC's Big Cat Live

The segment from the BBC's Big Cat Live filmed with the Holekamp Lab in 2008 is online:

More videos form the Big Cat series are at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigcat/video/

Requited Love

Previous bloggers have expressed great admiration for certain male hyenas that hold special places in their hearts. And while I can see where they're coming from, I must confess that I cannot agree with them. In my experience I find that love/hate relationships never work out. It takes a strong woman to move on from an unhealthy relationship to one that is requited and, therefore, fulfilling and worthy of the investment of her time.

Which is why my heart has been stolen away by Rough and Ready. He is an amazing specimen of all the qualities I could ask for in a male hyena.

He has the most amazing spots you can imagine and was even dubbed "Awesome Spot in our data collection until we deemed him worthy of an official name (Immigrant males have to earn their name by sticking around for a few obs sessions and proving to us they have integrated into the clan by their behavior towards the other hyenas.). His spots are so amazing that is easy to identify, even when completely caked in mud.

Which brings me to another point. He is NOT afraid to get a little dirty. He's a real man's man of a hyena, not a wussy boy who's afraid to get a little mud on his paws.

He showed up in Prozac territory acting like he owned the place, amicably hanging out with the other males, following the alpha female around, and sacking out in the center of the action without a care in the world. Not only that, but he has covered a lot of ground to get to where he is today. Jeff and Dave have confirmed that he is the same hyena that they had previously seen on the other side of the Mara and named Acme. He seems to have been trying out different territories to find the perfect fit (or he was looking for me!).

In contrast to some other males I know, he LOVES the car. You can't get close enough to bother him without consciously trying. He'll go about his business like you are a part or it, or as if he's glad you're there to witness and share it.

Ours is a love/love relationship and I couldn't be happier.

Who be that?!

One of my favorite parts of my job, silly as it seems, is naming hyenas. We have a fancy naming scheme to help us keep track of which hyenas are related. As soon as a hyena has her first litter of cubs we assign her a 'lineage' theme. These cubs and all the cubs she has after are given names that relate to this theme. For example, Murphy's (the alpha female of the Talek West clan) lineage is "Greek gods and goddesses" so her cubs have been named Helios, Adonis, Artemis, Morpheus, and Dionysus, just to name a few.

Immigrant males require a different system because the vast majority of the time we do not know their mothers. All immigrant males are named after cities and towns.

I get irrationally excited about naming cubs and thinking up new lineages. The hyenas can't mature fast enough for me to run out of lineage ideas that I want to use and the adult females can't pop out enough cubs for me to run out of name ideas for the lineages I really enjoy. Plus, when conversation gets slow around camp and we're looking for entertainment, cub names and lineages are inexhaustible discussion topics.

I'm also very proud of the hyenas I have had the honor of naming so far. My favorite hyena has turned out to be Gambit, a hyena I named in the Fig Tree clan. He/she (we're not sure what sex it is yet) was the first cub born to Potter so I was able to start the X-men lineage off with him. Not only was Gambit born on the day of my arrival in Kenya, but he/she has also turned out to be a pretty spunky little cub. Gambit is always "play romping" and "play biting" with the other bigger cubs at the den and even has the gall to be pesky to Carol Doda, one of our most grumpy hyenas.

Other successful naming endeavors include Wozzeck, The Cunning Little Vixen (both from the operas lineage), Aero, Krackle (chocolate bars lineage, Levi's, Wrangler (brands of jeans lineage), Cherry Garcia, Karamel Sutra (Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Flavors lineage), and Rough and Ready (immigrant male lineage; and yes, this really is the name of a town in California. It's a great place, look it up).

Camp Conditions in the Mara

One of the first questions I asked Kay when trying to figure out what I was getting myself into was "What are the living conditions of camp?" Her response was vague but I was excited to hear that we would have actual beds and our own tents. A bed was more than I had initially hoped for. When I made it to camp, I was in for a big surprise.

We are spoiled!

Not only do we get our own tents, my tent has turned out to be bigger than any room I have ever lived in by myself. There is plenty of furniture in each tent, making it possible to unpack. It's amazing how much unpacking your bags completely can make you feel settled and at home. AND the tents have electricity.

We have a shower AND it has HOT water!

We have amazing cooks that prepare all our meals and wash all our dishes. AND mamas come in from Talek to take care of our laundry.

Camp is located within a restricted area of the park so the only visitors we have are animals. My first week here, on our way back from evening obs, we had to go through a herd of giraffes that were just hanging out in our driveway. There was one just a few meters from our tent. There are tons of animals that live or visit camp. In Talek Camp, we get vervets, baboons, bush babies, genets, puff adders, elephants, giraffes, fruit bats, and more species of birds and insects than I could ever identify or list here. In Serena, the boys get lions, leopards, elephants, hippos, and much more. For a biologist, sharing your living space with so much wildlife is paradise.

Plus both camps are in beautiful settings. Talek is on the banks of the Talek River and is a lush green wonderland when it's raining. Serena is located on the side of a hill with views across the Mara to the escarpment.

Both camps have turned out to be much more established and comfortable than anything I had imagined before coming to Kenya. I almost feel silly calling it a "field camp" when I compare it to other camps I have worked out of in the past. We really are spoiled. Conditions like this make living in the bush for a year or more a piece of cake instead of a trial that must be overcome for the sake of the research.

What comes of all this field work, anyway?

Readers of this blog may occasionally ask themselves, "What ever becomes of all the information about hyenas these people are collecting in the African bush?" Well, the answer is that we do a lot of different things with the data we collect in the field. For instance, we help the managers of national parks figure out how best to manage hyenas and other large carnivores, we help develop broad conservation strategies for African wildlife, and we also make our results available to our colleagues in the scientific community. Every year we publish a number of papers in professional journals addressing topics in animal behavior, ecology and evolutionary biology. Our most recent paper, which appeared this week in a journal called Behavioral Ecology, attracted the attention of the BBC. This article, which has senior grad student Jenn Smith as the first author, inquires why hyenas sometimes gang up to form aggressive coalitions against their clanmates. Check out the photo feature about our new article on the BBC website at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8485653.stm

My Arrival

Today is my two month anniversary of my arrival in Kenya. Geez! And it seems like only yesterday...

I arrived in Kenya with the instructions to look for Jeff, a "tall, red-haired" guy. If anything went wrong and he wasn't there to pick me up, there was a back-up plan in place: borrow someone's cell phone. If that didn't work, Kay had given me all the info for a hotel nearby. Knowing how anything and everything that can go wrong, will go wrong when you're doing field work, I was mentally prepared for the worst. But, after traveling from San Francisco, to Seattle, to Amsterdam and finally to Nairobi, I was really, really hoping Jeff would just be there.

It took us a few moments to find each other in the crowd. I was probably the most nervous-looking mzungu (white person) there, so maybe that's what clued Jeff in. I was so relieved that he was there to pick me up that it didn't even bother me when one of the first things out of his mouth was, "So, we're having a bit of car trouble." Evidently Jeff had broken down on the way to the airport and had barely made it there. We were probably going to have to push start the car after we loaded my bags in. I didn't care. I had found him and I wasn't alone in a strange city, in a strange country, on a strange continent.

We did have to push start the car, twice in the airport parking lot and then once again in the gas station we stopped at for food. We tried again for a fourth, failed, and were lucky enough to get a jump start from some helpful Kenyans. I quickly learned "asante sana" meant "thank you very much."

All seemed well until we made our way into the unlit portions of Nairobi, near the cottage we stay in while in town. That was when it became quite obvious that our headlights were barely working. They continued to get dimmer and dimmer. And then, it began to rain. Heavily.

I still don't know how Jeff found the cottage in that rainy mess without headlights or streetlights. Even after two months, I have a hard enough time when it's just dark out. It would be impossible for me without headlights and I might as well not even try if it's raining on top of that! But, make it we did.

And somehow, in the midst of all that chaos, just outside the airport, I saw my very first wild zebras. I am convinced that this whole adventure was Kenya's way of rolling out the red carpet and welcoming me with open arms.

An Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have a real treat for you for the next eight months. At five feet, seven inches and 150 pounds, our newest blogger comes to us from Sacramento, California. This blonde haired, blue-eyed Amazonian queen has had a sundry past with research. Her insatiable appetite for adventure and field work has led to her partcipation in no less than five fact-finding missions. These include (1) an investigation of the broad-winged hawk's ability to recognize the coloration of the venomous coral snake, (2) a delving into the growth rates of invasive plant species, (3) an examination of the sexual communication of the greater sage-grouse, (4) an exploration of the long-necked and pig-nosed turtles of northern Australia, and (5) an analysis of the information encoded within the killer whale's call repertoire.

Her work with sage-grouse has been recognized by the Journal of Experimental Biology. And the Acoustical Society of America was honored to receive her in Paris, where she presented the preliminary results of her groundbreaking work with the orca. In 2008, she afforded the University of California, Davis the privilege of counting her among their alumni.

In the year following her graduation, she had a dark flirtation with environmental consulting and let's just all thank our lucky stars she has returned to the world of research to grace us with her presence.

She enjoys reading, ceramics, photography, and contemplating consciousness and the meaning of life. Her heroes include Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Leslie Curren.

It is now my esteemed pleasure to present to you this night, the talented, the amazing, the ever modest, Kenna Lehmann!

To the hyena blog faithful...

...I've officially left Fisi Camp for the last time, thus ending my blogging career. It's been a lot of fun and thanks for reading—stick around as the next generation of hyena researchers carries the torch. In the meantime, it's back to the real world for this Mama Fisi. Had to happen sometime. Catch you on the flip!

Where Have All The Wildebeest Gone?

The “Great Migration” has finally decided to move along from the Trans-Mara side of the Mara. Some of you may ask how it is possible to know when this is official, but let me just give you a couple photos to help exemplify my point.

Not more than 1 month ago, it looked like this everywhere:




There are still a few resident wildebeest that you can see around, but not nearly the all-encompassing groups that used to be a mainstay.

However with the wildebeest leaving, some of the other animals are coming back in larger numbers. You can imagine that with a few hundred thousand wildebeest, so come all of the flies and bugs that may get on the nerves of such temperamental animals such as elephants.


Another fun thing about the wildebeest leaving is that the zebras seem to stick around for the peace and quiet. It’s an interesting sight being able to see these black and white animals littering the landscape. Amazingly, it’s nearly impossible to take a bad picture of a zebra. All of my photos of these guys are going straight to National Geographic.

Te amo, te odio, te amo, te odio: an ode to Barcelona

Since first being introduced to the West clan in 2007, my favorite male has been Barcelona. Barcelona is the second-highest ranking immigrant male in the clan, but by far the best looking (in my opinion). He's always extremely well-fed and well-coiffed, like he keeps a comb and a mirror in his pocket just in case he runs into any ladies (which he always does—he's quite the social butterfly).

Barce moves from hyena sub-group to sub-group with confidence and ease—unusual qualities in an adult immigrant male. He seems comfortable with his place in society and knows when to keep his head low and his mouth shut, and when it's okay to push his luck a little further. For example, he's the only adult male I've ever seen groom an adult female...and she loved every second of it. Nobody else could get away with that. You can practically hear him counting down the days until Midget, the only immigrant male above Barce on the social ladder and an old, old man, kicks the bucket.

But Barcelona and I have a love-hate relationship. As in, I love him, and he hates me. And all other Fisi Campers. And our cars. Since the day he arrived in the West clan back in 2002, he's been extremely "spooky," which is our term for a hyena that fears our car. It's not unusual for immigrant males to be spooky—after all, whereas the adult females and cubs have all grown up with our cars, seeing us every day since the day they first poked their head out of the den, the immigrant males aren't used to being observed so closely and are understandably a tad more wary. Most of them get over it after a while...but not Barce.

One of my goals for being out here is to dart the males in our clans, in part because we need their DNA to determine paternity for all our cubs. As of one month ago, all the males in our West clan had been darted with one exception—Barcelona. He's been around for seven years—a long time in hyena years—but has thus far managed to evade all the efforts to dart him. When he sees us, he hides behind bushes, trees, other hyenas, grass clumps, you name it. He's very crafty: sometimes he won't even hide his whole body, he'll just hide the parts that he knows we can shoot (the butt and the side). In the evenings, when we can't dart because of impending darkness, he'll prance around the car, lollygagging with his butt in the air. For three field seasons he has been taunting me like this.

This year, I came to Kenya with the expectation that it would be my final field season, so I knew it was now or never for me to mend my relationship with Barcelona. As the months ticked down, I wracked my brain, hoping for a stroke of genius, some brilliant plan that no one had thought of until now. I asked everyone I knew for ideas, and here's what I got:

-get scuba gear and a waterproof gun and wait in the river for him to cross
-dig a tunnel that pops up near one of his favorite spots
-rent a helicopter and shoot him with one of those enormous nets used to dart elephants and rhinos
-buy a predator drone from the military and shoot him via joystick from my tent at camp

As creative and helpful as these ideas were, they all seemed slightly out of my budget range of zero US dollars (conversion to Kenyan shillings: zero Ksh). I was getting progressively more desperate...and more obsessed. Barcelona had started to haunt my dreams (no, I'm not exaggerating). I started to mentally prepare myself for what seemed like the inevitability that I would have to leave Kenya without his DNA. His cubs would forever go unclaimed, the only daddy-less black marks in an otherwise perfect paternity data set. The thought was devastating.

But there was one secret weapon I hadn't counted on: my man. And this time I'm not talking about Barcelona (although I have referred to him as "my man" more times than I can count). My boyfriend Dan was joining me for the last six weeks of my field season, and one benefit to having him here was going to be that he could be my "shooter" (I'm the driver). He had a little experience in marksmanship (thank youuuuuuu, Boy Scouts!) and is just generally very good at that kind of thing. So his first afternoon at Fisi Camp I plopped him out in the driveway with the darting gun, put out our practice target, and told him to get to work. The next morning he darted his first hyena and over the next week a few more to boot. But no Barce.

Dan could see how important darting Barcelona was to me, and being a competitive person, it soon became an obsession of his as well. So after a week he proclaimed that if Barce wouldn't let us get close enough to shoot (less than 30m), we would just have to figure out a way to shoot him from farther away. Three hours of practice shooting in the driveway later, and I had a shooter who was hitting the target from 40m away. This development introduced an entirely new set of rules to the game, and it rejuvenated my hope. I started to allow myself to think that we might actually get him. Our first few days post-New Rules were unsuccessful but encouraging. Barce was letting us get within 40m...a distance he thought was safe for him, since it had been for so many years. We could feel that it was coming.

And then, on October 29th—what a glorious day!—the stars aligned. We found Barcelona roaming around a small thicket of bushes, a little chubby and therefore more lethargic than usual. Perfect. He was wary of us, as always, and was fulfilling his mantra of "constant vigilance!" We can't shoot hyenas when they're looking at us, because we don't want them to associate the experience with humans, and Barce wouldn't take his eyes off us. But we didn't give up. We were following him in the car from about 40m away, waiting for something to distract him, when off in the distance we saw a herd of wildebeest begin running in a panic. Barce's eyes lit up as quickly as ours did. As we watched, a hyena isolated one wildebeest from the herd and began to close the gap. For a split second, Barce forgot himself and paused, mesmerized by the thought of fresh meat. That's all we (okay, Dan) needed. He pulled the trigger and we watched and waited to see if it hit.

Got him.

From 36m no less. Nothing short of a miracle. It only took a few minutes for Barcelona to fall asleep—in hindsight, surprising given his enormous mass of 65 kg (143 lbs.) When I first drew his blood into our vials, I was so overcome with emotion—relief, joy, disbelief, pride—that I teared up a little. Dan proclaimed his blood "liquid gold." And indeed it was. You can't see it in the photos, but we're pointing to the name on the vials—Barcelona.


Now I can relax. And relax we did—the last photo is of us celebrating. Dan is wearing a pod from a tree on his head as a crown. Don't ask...he just shot Barcelona—he can do whatever he wants!!! (I may live to regret those words....)