Just in time for Halloween, we had a ghost in camp. Benson
and I were working in the lab tent when I got a text from Emily, who’d been
looking at gps points from our collared animals. She asked us whether we’d seen
Pan around, since her collar was active again and had been sending in points
from around the territory, though she added that there were a lot of points in
camp. At first, I was really puzzled, since Pan was a hyena that died a few
months before I arrived. They found her body and collected her collar and
skull, but she was too far gone to determine what killed her. So now we were
receiving gps points from a dead hyena all over the territory.
For a brief moment, I wondered if there was any way Pan
could still be alive. After all, we’d seen some hyenas in our other two clans
that had been on the missing list, most recently Muhammad Ali, who hadn’t been
seen in over two and a half years. However, I’d held Pan’s skull, which seemed
pretty definitive.
It was Benson who solved the mystery: We had a new collar in
the darting box with the same frequency as Pan’s, and the magnet (which we use
to stop collars sending out points until we deploy them) had come off. So every
day when we went out with the darting supplies, the collar sent out another
point from somewhere in the territory, but most of the time it was in camp. It
also explained why we’d had inexplicably large amounts of interference on the
tracking some mornings.
Then, last night we saw Pan’s grand-cubs and I couldn’t help
but think of how much impact a single hyena can have in the future of the clan,
depending on how many of their offspring survive. Maybe that’s all that Pan’s
ghost was trying to tell us.
Thanks for posting, Phoebe! Glad you & Benson figured that out!
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