Hyenas in a Haystack

By Emily Thorne, IRES 2013

Emily T., Emily B., and Moira with Digs.

I always figured one day I would come face to face with some large and scary carnivore, but had you asked me a few months ago I never would have thought it would be a wild adult female hyena. Moreover, I couldn’t begin to imagine that I would be in the back of a moving Land Cruiser straddling this hyena, keeping her safe as she started to wake up, while trying not to let myself get thrown around with every bump and dip in the road that threatened to send me flying. If you asked me today I would tell you I couldn’t wait to do it again.

Hyena research has its exciting and unbelievable moments, no doubt, but it also requires a lot of time and an incredible amount of patience. Some of the hyenas being studied here in the Mara have been fitted with GPS and VHF collars that provide the researchers with valuable data about where the hyenas are located, allow the hyenas to be tracked using radio telemetry equipment, and even record the temperature. Once the hyenas are wearing their new high-tech accessories they can usually be found much easier and may lead us to a few collarless hyenas they happen to be hanging around with. The difficulty lies in finding the hyena and putting the collar on in the first place.

Since we arrived in Serena, Dave has been on a mission to find and collar one particular hyena in the Serena North clan: Sauer, the lowest ranking of the high ranking females. A female spotted hyena’s rank in the social hierarchy is inherited from her mother. For this project the hierarchy was divided into equal thirds (high, medium, and low) and a few high and low ranking females from three clans were selected to receive a GPS collar. We spent several mornings driving around the entire North territory in search of a needle in a haystack. Sauer’s cubs were no longer den-dependent so she could be anywhere.  One morning we managed to stumble upon her and her two cubs. This seemed promising so we followed her. And followed her. And followed her some more. She seemed quite content to wander around in what seemed like every patch of tall grass in the Mara, almost strategically avoiding any areas that would allow for a safe and easy shot with the dart gun. Finally she settled on a nice cozy spot. Unfortunately for us that spot happened to be in a lugga, which meant tall grass, water, mud and absolutely no chance for us that day. The next time we found her she was on the move again. We followed her for over an hour through excellent areas with short grass and no thickets or luggas but she just wouldn’t stop moving. She wound up leading us back to the den, which happened to be hyena party central that morning. Our luck seemed to be turning around when she wandered away from the den to a patch of short grass and sacked out. Just as we were finally about to get a good shot along comes another female. Apparently Sauer wasn’t in the mood for company because she stood up and started to wander off again. We followed her but she gave us the slip once more. We watched her walk into a rock field, up the side of a hill and out of site into a thicket. Twice we almost had her and twice she managed to get the best of us.

It turns out however, that it was a good thing she did. To our surprise, our plans suddenly changed when we witnessed an interaction between Sauer and another female named Digs. It turned out that Digs, who had been lower ranking than Sauer, had jumped a step up on the social ladder, something that isn’t seen too frequently in a stable hyena hierarchy. She had surpassed Sauer (who was now a middle ranker) and was now the new lowest ranking of the high ranking females. This meant that Sauer was out and Digs was our new target.

Dave, Wes and I had spent several mornings driving around South in search of Marten, another female Dave wanted to put a collar on, when one morning we received a call from Lily, Moira and Julie who were driving around in North. They had spotted Digs so we headed on over.

At first we thought Digs was going to give us the run around like Sauer had. After over an hour of slowly following her around the North territory past luggas and thickets, through tall grass and around lots of puddles she finally made it to the perfect spot. We were driving slowly next to her, as close as possible trying not to spook her. In one fraction of a second she stopped right next to us, turned her head away with her back end in just the right position and Dave took a perfect shot. It only took a few minutes for her to go down and then I got to see a truly wild (but chemically immobilized) hyena up close and personal. My first thought was that she was huge, but at about 50 kilograms she was actually on the small side for a female hyena. Being that close to a wild large carnivore was surreal. Her feet looked like my dog’s feet only twice the size. Her fur was surprisingly coarse to the touch.  Her sharp carnivore teeth and huge jaw muscles left no doubt that she could do a number on a wildebeest or buffalo. We got to work immediately. We collected blood and other bodily substances (we can all now say we have “milked a hyena”, literally) and measured her head, teeth, limbs, and numerous other body parts. We measured her neck and fitted her new collar so that it was loose enough to be comfortable but tight enough that it wouldn’t fall off. After checking to make sure the collar was working properly we weighed her.

Just as we were finishing up she started to come to. Perfect timing. We carried her to the car on a stretcher and Lily, Moira and I climbed in the back with her. Since it was a rather bumpy ride and the immobilization drugs were starting to wear off (and I happened to be sitting closest to her) I made sure she didn’t get tossed around. And let me tell you, riding in the back of the car with one knee in a puddle of hyena drool, the other leg over Digs’ body (which smelled ever so slightly of dead elephant) in order to brace myself and not squish her, while leaning over to keep her eyes covered and head down was probably one of the most bizarre and coolest things I have ever done. We left Digs under some nice trees in a shady thicket, made sure she was nice and cool so she wouldn’t overheat and surrounded her with big branches to keep her safe. When we checked on her later that day she had fully recovered and was already out and about taking care of hyena business.

Digs is doing very well with her fancy new collar. We have tracked her around the territory multiple times since then and Dave has been collecting lots of GPS points for her. Her data, along with the other collared hyenas’ data, will enable researchers to answer important research questions that have never been able to be answered on such an interesting and dynamic species as the spotted hyena. I hope I get to lend a hand in more of these incredible experiences during the rest of my stay here the Mara.

Alien Abduction!

I don’t know if you would remember from last summer, but part of my research is looking at hyenas’ boldness. So, I have been doing tests with a life-size model hyena which hyenas seem to interpret as an intruder. This model is actually an archery target, so we call it Target. Last year, I introduced you to Target and Junior, and this year I brought Targé III to the Mara with me.

The newly set up Targé III

Anyways, I have been conducting the same experiments as last year where I put Target out in front of a lone hyena and see how they react to the “intruder” to measure their boldness. I’m doing this experiment again this year firstly to get enough data to analyze; secondly, I want to compare the data I get from our Talek clans where there is a lot of human disturbance to our Serena clans where there is less human disturbance. Currently, I am in Serena, and these trials have been going really well. However, right now I’m going to tell the story of Diggory’s awful, no good, horrible, very bad day.

Diggory, otherwise known as Digs, is a hyena in our North clan at Serena. On this day in particular, I’m sure her day started as any other until she came ambling down a road by herself towards this crazy white car that always stops to look at her for a long time for some reason. Inside the car, I get all excited because it is the perfect set up for a Target trial. We rush to a bend in the road so that she won’t see us put out Targé before we even identify who is coming down the road. We pull to the side of the road to record her interaction with Targé, and Lily, the research assistant with me, actually looks at the hyena to figure out who she is. It quickly becomes apparent that the hyena is Digs because she has a big notch out of the lower part of her right ear.

Digs is sort of high ranked in the clan, which has made her a desirable target to Dave who wanted to dart her to put on a GPS collar. Dave had been trying for awhile to find a hyena around Digs’s rank to deploy his last GPS collar for his research. At first I was excited that we were getting a Target trial with Digs, but then I realized we couldn’t let Digs go out of sight at the end of the trial like I normally would if Dave was going to dart her. Diggory couldn’t disappear before Dave had a chance to reach us; he was in a different one of our territories. We let the Target trial continue, and Lily calls Dave to tell him to rush over for Digs.

Digs meanwhile is completely bewildered by Targé. She circles to get downwind of it, but she is a little hesitant to approach. She does everything in her power to figure out who this hyena is without having to get too close. In the end, Digs still gets closer to Targé than many of the Talek hyenas did, but she quickly decides to leave after doing so.

Diggory and Target

In the car, I’m trying to figure out the best time to end the trial. I can’t end it as I normally would because we would lose her, and Dave hadn’t arrived to follow her yet. In the end, I wait until she has walked about 40m away and is still facing away. We don’t want her to see us pick up Target because we don’t want the hyenas to associate too much weird stuff with our cars. However, she turns around just in time to see my summer student, Moira, lifting Targé into the back of the truck. I look up to see Digs turn around, and her whole body posture changes. She jumps, her head comes bolt upright with her ears pricked completely forward, her body tenses, and her tail sticks straight out from her body. It was then that I realize that she definitely had not recognized that Targé was not a real hyena; Digs looked as if she had just witnessed an alien abduction.

After pacing back and forth a bit, Digs seems to have settled herself enough to keep walking on, and of course, we follow. She goes off road, but we still follow her from a distance. Now we want her to be calm and not get spooked and run away before Dave can arrive to try to dart her. We slowly follow her for about twenty minutes until Dave reaches us. She keeps looking back at us, and in the car we were entertaining ourselves with a running narrative. “You’re still there? Why are you following me? I’m not doing anything interesting. I’m not even at the den with my cub where you usually spy on me. Maybe if I ignore you, you’ll go away. What, you’re still there? Good grief. You already took one hyena!”

Once Dave finds us and Digs, he continues to follow her for another hour and a half until she is in a good position to be darted. Lily, Moira, and I hang back further in case Digs somehow escapes Dave, Wes, and Emily. Finally, Digs’s morning is interrupted again when Dave darts her. We were all ecstatic because Dave had been trying for months to get that last collar out. But then the real alien abduction occurs. She is knocked out, we take all sorts of measurements from her, collect blood and bacterial samples, and then transport her in a car to a safe place to wake up.

Collecting samples and measurements from Digs

And after that terrible morning, Digs woke up wearing new jewelry, a lovely GPS collar. The collars seem to annoy them for the first day, but after that, they get used to it pretty quickly.

Digs looking spiffy in her collar

Luckily for us, Digs isn’t acting strange around the cars these days. We still see her, and now we can track her. But I wonder what she must have been thinking that entire morning.