We’ve been living a nightmare these past several days.
Someone poisoned a carcass in Talek West territory, and we’ve lost four hyenas
that we know of so far, which are in addition to Honey, Idi, and Endor, who
were poisoned last week outside the reserve. This second poisoning happened
relatively close to the den, but we never found the carcass itself.
Blanket was the first casualty. Hadley and Benson found him
dead at the end of morning obs. He had a sticky pink substance coming out of
his anus, and was bleeding from his mouth, nose and eyes. When they brought his
body back to camp, it looked like he was crying blood. The necropsy was
fascinating in a very awful way; whatever they used to poison him was a
disturbingly potent substance. The flies that landed on Blanket began to die,
littering the ground around him with their twitching bodies. His internal
organs, especially the liver, were discolored, and had a blotchy, irritated
look to them. The inside of his stomach contained the remains of a calf that looked
like it had been doused in a pink substance the color of pepto bismol.
Then, while we were still reeling from Blanket’s death, we
got a call that there were more dead hyenas. I had been hoping we might get a
day or so before other bodies turned up, or that maybe the calf in Blanket’s
stomach was too small to kill many others, but there’s practically no way to
kill only one animal with poison. This is because poison is indiscriminant and
creates a huge amount of collateral damage. What I have been told is that
usually, when a herder poisons a carcass, it kills scores of hyenas, a few
lions, lots of jackals and vultures, and even domestic dogs. What is even more
concerning is that the flies that died around Blanket clearly demonstrate that
this poison remains deadly even after it is consumed, which means that it can
spread secondarily to an even broader swath of the ecosystem. To add another
level of concern, when an animal is poisoned, it seeks out water to drink. This
means that they can also spread the poison to an aquatic ecosystem, which in an
area where most people get their drinking water from rivers could actually end
up harming humans as well. The probable and potential effects of a poisoning
event are extremely serious and disturbingly wide reaching. So we knew after
Blanket that there would be others, but we were still dreading what we would
see.
As we drove towards the area where Hadley and Benson found
Blanket, we saw a strange shape in a tree, a tangle of cream-colored wings
sticking out at odd angles from the branches. As we drove up, we saw it was a
dead tawny eagle hanging off its perch. Above it, there was another eagle that
was panting and struggling to fly away. We managed to get the dead one out and
when we looked at it, we saw pink goo oozing from its mouth and the stain of
pink on its feet. Tawny eagles are a bit like vultures in that they will also
congregate at a kill to eat the meat. In this case, that exposed them to the
poison as well.
We had to climb on the car to get the tawny eagle out of the
tree, and as we looked across the plain, we realized that there were more small
bodies scattered across it, from a variety of species. Even before we got close
to each of them, I felt a sense of horror seeing the scale of effect laid out before
us.
After a half hour of collecting dead animals, our non-hyena
casualty total was three tawny eagles, one vulture, and two jackals. We knew
that there were probably many more that we would never find, because there was
a dense lugga nearby that most of the dead animals would have sought out as
they died.
 |
| Hadley photographs a dying Tawny Eagle that was killed secondarily after feeding on this Black-backed Jackal that died from ingesting poison |
The first hyena we found that afternoon was Mousetrap. She’s
a bossy young female with one of the most distinctive spot patterns of any
hyena in the clan. She had just had her first cub, Earl Warren (Ewar for
short), who is a rambunctious mischief-maker and is too young to survive
without her. When we found Mousetrap, there were two strings of dried blood
coming out of her nose, coated in dead flies, and the same telltale pink stains
on her fur.
 |
| Mousetrap, as we found her |
The next hyena was Xenon. She was another beautiful young
first time mother. We had just finally confirmed seeing her nurse the night
before, and hadn’t even given her cub a name yet. Her cub is also too young to
survive without her. Later, when KWS vets were doing a post-mortem on her body,
they found signs of internal hemorrhaging. Her lungs were full of blood, and
her stomach held the remains of a calf that were stained an otherworldly neon
pink and purple.
Wilson mentioned that some of the hyenas might try to get to
the den as they were dying, so we made our way towards it. We found another
hyena in the creek behind the den, deep in the bushes. It took us a while to
get her out of the water, but when we laid her out we saw it was Obama. Obama
is yet another first-time mother, and her cub Sycamore Fig is also too young to
survive without her.
Finding Obama highlighted just how difficult it will be to
know exactly how many animals were killed by this single event. If others also
went into water surrounded by bushes, we may never find them.
 |
| The KWS vet team conducting their post-mortem on Xenon and the others |
Despite the sincere concern expressed by those officials
present at the post-mortem for Mousetrap, Xenon, and Obama, we were a little
worried that no real action would be taken as a result of the poisoning. We
were very wrong about that. The response has been overwhelming. The County
Council blocked all livestock grazing in the reserve until the community brings
them the person responsible. If nothing else, I hope this sends a strong
message that poisonings are not an acceptable reaction to livestock predation
and that hyenas are a valuable part of this ecosystem.
(Correction: Sycamore Fig is actually not Obama's first cub, but her second. Her first cub, Acacia, died when Obama got her snare.)
