What Are Your Favorite Hyena Blog Stories?

The Notes From Kenya blog is about to hit several milestones: two years of blogging and 200 posts. This is a perfect time to reflect on the success and gather some feedback (and have a friendly little competition among bloggers past and present).

There have been some remarkable stories shared here and we'd like your input as to which ones indeed are the best. Yes, we can look at the Google Analytics data and see that we've had 44,000 visits from people in 154 countries. That same data shows Kay's Birth Through A Soda Straw post was the most popular. This was followed closely by Kate's Mythbusters and Thrill of the Hunt and then Kay's very first post Lion-Hyena Fight.

Yet, as with many things, the numbers don't always give the entire story. Other media coverage, press releases, search engine optimization and external forces sometimes skew these numbers. For example, Kate's Crazy Things Guys Do For Girls was a big hit on Facebook; Kenna's Necropsies grossed many people out; Andy's Jingle Bells offered a twist on the holiday travel stories; and Leslie's Running in Kenya brought some visitors to the blog who were expecting personal fitness related stories.  

So to mark the two year anniversary of the blog, we'd like to determine the "Fan Favorite" hyena blog post. To phrase this another way, we are going to conduct a poll.

This is where we need your help. Nominate your favorite blog post(s) using the comment space below. We'll collect the nominations and do a poll among the most popular stories. What stories are the most memorable? What stories have you enjoyed the most or passed along to friends? The comment thread is open, so please nominate as many as you like. (And yes, we do expect hyena blogging alumni to enlist their family and friends to vote for their own pieces).

Then we'll compile the nominations and put a poll up in a couple weeks. The blog post with the most votes will win. The writer of the Fan Favorite post will receive bragging rights and a pat on the back from Kay (unless the post is by Kay in which case she'll need some acknowledgement from the folks at Fisi Camp).

If you need help finding a post, use the search box or keywords listed on the left. There are plenty of great stories from the bloggers, so have at it friends and let us know what you like the best. We'd love to hear from all of our readers, so please post your comments. Thank you!

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....)

How low can your belly go?

A hungry adult spotted hyena can consume a LOT of food in a single meal. An adult hyena is shown in the top photo before consuming a meal. An adult female typically weighs about 65 kg (roughly 145 lbs). Although average meal size for spotted hyenas varies across Africa from 0.2 kg to 9 kg, an individual hyena can consume approximately 18 kg of meat and bone in an hour. That's 40 lbs of food, folks. Imagine how you'd feel if you had just consumed 160 Quarter Pounders at one sitting. A bit bloated, right? Well the bottom photo here shows you what a spotted hyena looks like under the same circumstances. Notice that she's still going strong, continuing to feed even though her belly is almost touching the ground. Now you can also imagine how hard it is to determine when a female spotted hyena is pregnant based on her appearance; with her belly size going up and down this much during feeding and fasting, it's very tough to detect the presence of a litter that, at most, will weigh only about 3 kg!

Why eat so much at a single meal that you can barely waddle away afterward? Well, if you're a female spotted hyena, you do this because your ability to produce and support babies is strictly determined by how much food you consume. And you never know when or where your next meal might be coming from. If you were dining at McDonald's and knew you might not be able to eat again for several days, I bet you'd probably try to jam in an extra Quarter Pounders or two yourself.

Animals have brains too (Part II)

So how can you test hyenas’ intelligence?

First, we tried sitting our hyenas down and giving them IQ tests. Unfortunately, they couldn’t hold the pens, and they ended up eating the test booklets. Back to the drawing board.

Seriously though, in order to be effective, our test had to meet a few criteria. First of all, it had to be hyena-proof. It needed to be something our hyenas couldn’t destroy, consume, or drag away.

The test also had to be something that, even with their limited dexterity, hyenas could manipulate in some way to “solve.”

Finally, the test had to represent a “novel task,” which is scientist-speak for “a challenge the hyenas have never seen before.” This way, we know the hyenas aren't just relying on some skill they already have.

Luckily, clever grad student Sarah Benson-Amram came along and developed a test that meets all these criteria. Called a “puzzle box,” it’s based on an invention by psychologist E.L. Thorndike.

Essentially, it’s a big box made of rebar (and when I say “big”, I mean “BIG…” this thing weighs about 75 pounds). The box has a swinging door that closes and locks with a sliding latch. We put a piece of meat inside the box as an incentive, close and lock the door, and present it to a hyena. Their task is to figure out how to get to open the box and get to the meat inside. Just like a Rubik’s cube or Sudoku puzzle is a brainteaser for us, the puzzle box is a way to test hyenas’ problem-solving abilities.

My favorite thing about watching hyenas interact with the box is the multitude of strategies they employ. Some bite the box; others dig underneath it. A few flip and tumble the box. Some decide that an aerial view will help, so they get on top of the box and peer down. Many hyenas try the “If I lie here and stare at it long enough, it will open” strategy. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen this one work yet.

Sarah spent an amazing amount of time and effort developing the box and working out the kinks. During Sarah’s research, 9 Mara hyenas (out of 58 who tried) opened the box. On average, a hyena needed to work on the box three different times before they could open it. One smarty-pants, Snaggletooth, got so good at the task that he was able to open the box in 3 seconds; Kent, shown below, could do it in 5 seconds.

I'm now doing some work with the box here at Serena. While all this just the tip of the iceberg, it’s certainly a promising – and interesting – way to look at animals’ intelligence.

Hyenas, by the numbers

Let's face it: we all love fun facts. With these, you can impress your friends and family, or at least procrastinate for a few minutes...
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The oldest hyena we’ve studied is K-Butt, who lived for nearly 17.5 years.

The lovable Bailey holds the record for our heaviest hyena, weighing in at a whopping 179 lbs. She was just under 3 feet tall at the shoulder.

Hyenas can run at 40 miles per hour for about 2 miles. For comparison, the fastest human clocked in at just over 27 miles per hour, and that was only for 100 meters. Wimp.

In the longest hyena hunt ever recorded, a hyena chased an eland for nearly 15 miles.

While the average hunting group size is 1.8 hyenas, successful zebra hunts require 10 or more hyenas. The reason? Hyenas need to call in reinforcements against male zebras, who protect their ladies fiercely and have a deadly kick.

Here in the Mara, hyenas kill 95% of the food that they eat. I bet you scavenge a heck of a lot more than 5% of your food.

Their bone-crushing bite force has been estimated at about 9000 newtons (2000 pounds), which roughly equals the force of a big NFL hit.

They have 11 distinctive vocalizations.

They can hear noises from over 6 miles away, and can probably identify odors from a distance of nearly 2 miles.

A mother hyena’s milk contains 15% protein, compared to less than 1% protein in human milk. No wonder hyenas grow up fast and become big bullies!

When erect, a female hyena's pseudopenis may be up to 7 inches long. Enough said.



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**Remember, we're talking about spotted hyenas...the other hyena species are strange in their own ways. Most of the info here is from our observations. The rest is from the IUCN Hyaena Specialist Group website (http://www.hyaenidae.org/) and the book The Spotted Hyena by Hans Kruuk. Both are fantastic sources of information for you hyena-philes out there!