If You Want to See a Cheetah Hunt...

As manager of Dr. Kay Holekamp’s laboratory in Michigan, the Mara is not normally where you find me. Our research assistants (or “RAs”) are the ones in the field and the usual contributors on the blog. Logging hundreds of hours with our hyenas, they collect data that later finds its way to my desk in Michigan. Having never been an RA, it’s been a priority for me to see how ours live and work day-to-day by visiting the Maasai Mara myself – and I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to do just that!

“The field” (a catch-all term for anywhere biologists gather their data) doesn't have to be across the world. Depending on the project, a field site might even be the bird feeder in a scientist’s backyard. At the Mara Hyena Project, we’re lucky enough to call the sprawling, scenic grasslands of the Maasai Mara our study site – a place easy to imagine as packed with nonstop action. After all, TV depicts the Mara as a place of constant, thrilling hunts, shot from every angle and in great lighting.

While everyone here has to eat, actually witnessing a hunt isn’t easy as television might make it seem. It’s tough to be a predator, and some of the most popular – cats, like lions and leopards – miss their catch far more often than they succeed. To see a hunt in action, even an unsuccessful one, you have to be in the right place at exactly the right time.

But it’s not all serendipity. There’s a price that every observer, from film crew to researcher, has to pay: Watching gorgeous animals, who could wow you with any number of exciting behaviors, do absolutely nothing but sleep. A lot.


By now you know that we don't study cheetahs, but they do share the Mara with our spotted hyenas. And who passes up the chance to see a cheetah?

The scene is this: We’re on a morning drive, watching a few hyenas at the den. Sacked out in the grass, moms are suckling their cubs. One of our RAs, Jana, is quizzing me on hyena IDs. She takes photos, passes them to me, and I practice recognizing individuals by their spots. It’s shaping up to be a pleasant but routine morning.

We drive on and come across a group of tourist trucks, clustered around something tucked in the grass. It’s a cheetah. There’s no space to squeeze in for a good look, and then an “alien” male – a hyena who isn’t part of our study clans – wanders into view. It’s back to work and we take off after him, following until he’s gone beyond the boundaries of our study groups.

By the time we get back, the cheetah is alone and asleep. Her audience has moved on, searching for a more exciting way to spend their vacation time. We break for a few minutes and hope she’ll do something.


It doesn't look promising. 

We whisper hopeful instructions, encouraging her to notice the nearby antelope or call for a pair of (imaginary) cubs. She gets up and wanders along the roadside, pausing on a mound of dirt. It’s the perfect place to survey the landscape for prey. Is that what she’s doing?


Nope. After this photo she lays back down.

I’m someone who could watch a cheetah sleep all day. When it comes to wildlife viewing, patience is part of the deal – if we wait, who knows what might happen? But we have other work to do. There are no hyenas here now, and we're stalling. A cheetah is still a cat, and she could spend hours napping, relaxing, or just deciding which direction to walk in.

Just a few more minutes, we decide.

Then, there’s the rapid drum of footsteps. I look toward Jana’s window. Outside it, everything is happening at once.

 
The cheetah swings around the back of the car, kicking up dust across the dirt road. She and her target come into full view. 

An African hare!

I swivel the lens and keep shooting. A sprinting cheetah is so fast, you will miss it if you blink.

It all takes just a few seconds. The cheetah gives up the chase, and the hare disappears into the grass. What might have been a brief moment with a sleeping cheetah turned out to be action-packed after all – especially for the hare.
 
Authored by Sabrina S. Salome
Photos © Sabrina S. Salome

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....)

Killer cheetah

Cheetahs are pretty big cats, but in most cases if a cheetah encounters leopard, lion, or a hyena (hyenas are neither cats nor dogs), it will almost always retreat or give up kill. Cheetahs specialize in killing Thompson's gazelle (Tommie), a relatively small and fast animal. We have recently seen one male cheetah almost on a daily basis.

We first saw it scent marking territory not too far from our camp. Then we saw it emerging from the bushes one day and Ben said, "It looks like it is going to hunt." Being the diligent HYENA researchers that we are, we left the cheetah to look for hyenas. About 30 minutes later we saw the cheetah scarfing down a Tommie. We had never seen a cheetah hunt, so we were disappointed.

The next day we were on our way home from our morning observations when I spotted the same cheetah crouched about 30 meters from our truck. This cheetah was definitely stalking prey. I didn't want to talk, because the cheetah was close enough that my voice may have disturbed it, so I tapped Ben on the shoulder and quietly said, "cheetah." He slowed down and came to a stop just past the cheetah. I reached in the backseat for my video camera. Before I could get the camera ready, the hunt was on! There was a group of Tommie's about 150 meters away from the cheetah and it seemed an insurmountable distance to cover. I tried to get video for a second and realized it was futile and just sat riveted watching the fastest land animal on earth pursue its quarry. The cheetah closed the gap between itself and the cheetahs in about 5 seconds and chased a small Tommy over a hill. We lost sight of it at this point. We drove over the hill and saw the cheetah carrying the Tommy in its mouth. The chase covered about 300-400 meters in less than 20 seconds, resulting in a nice meal for the cheetah.

A few days later we were once again on our way home and Ben spotted something lying behind a bush. We drove closer to investigate and discovered it was a dead impala. Not just a dead impala, but a large adult male impala. I have seen male impala stand its ground against hungry hyenas, so killing an adult male impala is no small feat. They are fast enough to outrun most predators and strong enough to fend off the smaller predators. Not so on this day.

As the impala came into full view, we saw our friendly cheetah had already eaten the entire left leg of this impala! The cheetah looked fat and seemed to be taking a break from eating. We watched for a few minutes and the cheetah decided it could pack a few more pounds of meat away.

My initial thought was that the impala may have died from some other cause, such as disease, since there was no blood on the impala, except the leg where the cheetah had eaten. After taking a closer look with the binoculars we could see puncture holes in the neck of the impala where the cheetah had clamped it canines around the throat of the recently departed impala.

Later in the evening, another researcher stopped by the kill site and said the cheetah had eaten all four legs (that is where the most muscle tissue is) and most of the high calorie internal organs. Then a young hyena, named Acadia, approached the carcass and began nibbling. After a few nibbles, Acadia pulled the carcass away from the obese cheetah. Had the cheetah not been eating for 3 straight hours, it may have put up a fight. Acadia is about 16 months old and has a long way to go before being a full-size hyena, but an impressive feat none-the-less, taking a fresh kill from a killer cheetah like this one.












Why did I eat so much?

Was it worth it?

Last week we came upon Artemis, an adult female in the Talek West clan, digging a hole. She was using her front legs to scratch the dirt loose and her back legs to launch it skyward. Hyenas use dens for their cubs, but they do not dig the holes themselves or even fit into the hole usually. Most hyena den holes were originally dug by aardvarks. I was finally lucky enough to see my first aardvark a few weeks ago. Many animals in the Mara use aardvark holes, including bat-eared foxes, jackals, warthogs and hyenas to name a few.

Back to the original point. We immediately wondered, why was Artemis digging a hole? The only legitimate reasons we could think of were that she was indeed digging a den hole, or at least enlarging an existing hole, or trying to dig out something to eat. We sat captivated waiting for a resolution to the hole digging conundrum. Well, maybe not captivated the entire time, but we were very interested to see what would happen and recorded the scene in detail.



After about 10 minutes, another adult female hyena arrived. This was Gucci and she is a very curious hyena in my opinion. Gucci approached Artemis and inspected the excavation with great interest. Artemis basically ignored Gucci and continued digging. Gucci decided to sack out directly behind Artemis. This made for an interesting scene with Artemis throwing dirt in Gucci's face for about 10 minutes. Gucci did not seem the least bit bothered.



Artemis regularly pulled her head out of the hole to take a look around, possibly being vigilant for lions. I didn't notice if her vigilance rate increased after Gucci arrive, but it would have been interesting to note if she became less vigilant after the arrival of another set of eyes. At a couple points during the digging it appeared as if Artemis was snapping her killer jaws at something in the hole, but each time came up empty and returned to digging. At this point we were pretty sure there was something hiding below the surface. Was it a warthog, a bat-eared fox, a mongoose? You could cut the tension with knife as we waited. Well, not really, but it was fun to watch.



Finally, Artemis made a quick strike into the hole and pulled out her quarry. Twenty minutes of digging and she was rewarded with a rat! Yes, a little rat. She carried it for about 5 meters, then gulped it down in one bite. This was no Thanksgiving dinner for Artemis. Meanwhile, Gucci thought maybe there was another rat. She took a look in the hole and then wandered off. So did we.

The thrill of the hunt

We came upon a group of zebras meandering along the riverbank. Out of nowhere, a lioness streaked out of the bushes...


Running at full speed, she lunged for a big female zebra (deftly avoiding its powerful kick)!


She hung on for dear life and dragged the zebra to the ground.






Against all odds, the zebra made a valiant attempt to stand up...


But the lioness had the zebra in a death grip, and she tightened her stranglehold on the zebra's neck.




Finally, it was all over. The lioness, panting hard, finally relaxed.


It wasn't long before this mama and her cubs arrived from over a nearby hill, followed closely by 9 other lions.


The pride settled down to a nice family dinner.

That's all, folks

A mere four days later, the hippo buffet is history.

Day 3: Hyena heaven

The hyenas finally found their moment just before dawn, and the hippo kill finally became theirs. By 6am, more than 15 hyenas had converged on what was left of the carcass.


However, after more than 72 hours, there's not a lot left to this once-massive beast.


Once they finished all the meat on the hippo, our beloved bone-crackers started in on the skeleton. Here, you can see the effects of their unbelievable jaws...they can (with not a whole lot of effort) break right through the ribs to get to the marrow.


However, apparently hyenas' amazing eating skills don’t extend to hippo hide. This stuff is amazingly think, and apparently pretty hyena-proof. They gnaw and gnaw on it, but it’s kind of like a dog chewing on rawhide. You know that eventually it will disappear, but it doesn’t look easy (or delicious).


This hyena tried a different strategy: maybe there’s something UNDER this nasty tough skin! Unfortunately...there wasn’t. He settled down and began to chew like everyone else.


By late morning, nothing was left but a few straggling hyenas, a spinal column, and a big slab of hippo hide.

A new day dawns on the hippo...

Here's the hippo, day 2. A LOT of meat is gone, in a bit over 24 hours! You can see the ribs are exposed, so just the meat along the backbone, as well as some scraps near the head, are left.


The lions, completely stuffed after collectively consuming several thousand pounds of meat, were lying in the bushes nearby. One greedy lioness didn't like the vultures feeding on "her" carcass. Every time the vultures wound descend, she would drag her painfully fat body up, and chase them off. She'd then return immediately to the shade to sleep off the indigestion from which she must have been suffering. You can see her in the corner of this picture, just after she scared all the vultures away.


This jackal was a bit luckier than the vultures, and somehow managed to snag an entire hippo leg for himself. Despite the leg being bigger than he is, he tried valiantly to drag it away from the scene to keep it safe from other scavengers. Needless to say, he didn't make much progress.


Our hyenas have been lurking around, waiting for a good opportunity to make a move, but the lions' presence hasn't given them their chance...yet.

Ever wonder what 7,000 pounds of meat look like?

Once upon a time, a hippo lived in a water hole about a kilometer north of our camp. One night, that hippo went out grazing, as he did every evening. Unfortunately, he never made it home. A group of hungry lions were lying in ambush, and hunted the hippo down just a few hundred meters from his little pool.


In the interest of science, I've decided to document where those 3 tons of hippo meat go, day by day. Here's the carcass about 12 hours after the hippo was killed. Two male lions were at the kill, and from the size of their bellies, they had apparently been gorging themselves all night.


These guys were already so full that they could barely breathe. They'd nibble half-heartedly on some meat, then waddle away a few feet and lie down to rest and digest.


In 12 hours, the lions have barely made a dent in the massive carcass. However, they haven't had any competition for their prize yet. We'll have to wait to see what happens overnight.

**By the way, I know not everyone is as interested in seeing photos of carcasses as we are. If these posts get too gross, comment and let me know!

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls, Wildebeest—it Tolls for Thee

WARNING: This post contains graphic material that may be unsuitable for some readers. Like anyone eating lunch right now. Shouldn’t you be getting back to work anyway, instead of procrastinating by checking blogs?

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This morning was bittersweet. We had just left a large group of adult hyenas napping in some bushes when we spotted an adult wildebeest acting a bit strangely in the distance. Upon driving closer, we saw that it was straddling one of our adult females, Adonis (one of Murphy’s many daughters). Adonis had her face buried in the side of the wildebeest, which was open and spilling guts. The wildebeest wasn’t moving much, it was just standing there, halfheartedly trying to head-butt Adonis, who had cleverly positioned herself out of reach of its horns. Adonis, meanwhile, was happily munching away on various internal organs.

The distraction we provided when we pulled up afforded the wildebeest the window of opportunity to dash away. It ran to the far side of our car, seeking asylum. Adonis backed off for a moment as the wildebeest pressed its less-bloody side against our back door. We try to avoid getting involved in interactions in any way, however, so we pulled away. Adonis continued her feast, and within minutes, the wildebeest had collapsed onto the ground. A few minutes later, after some final efforts at thrashing, the wildebeest died. It was very brave throughout the whole ordeal: it hardly cried at all, which is atypical.

I say that this was bittersweet for obvious reasons. On the one hand, it is extremely difficult to watch an animal meet such an untimely end, to watch a life expired in front of your eyes. Today’s episode wasn’t even as brutal to spectate as it could have been; as I mentioned, there was hardly any bleating, which always pulls at the heartstrings. Also, this was an adult wildebeest. Seeing a juvenile of any species hunted in front of its panicked mother is unquestionably more painful for me.

On the other hand, everything needs to eat, and that includes carnivores. Their evolutionary path has led them to hunt live prey, which makes some people think of them as savage killers, but watching a carnivore die of starvation is just as heartbreaking as watching an herbivore starve. Also, we are here on the Mara Hyena Project, which means that at the end of the day, we are on Team Hyena, so it’s not that difficult for us to make the decision to remain uninvolved when it’s going to benefit the hyenas. In today’s case, this meant driving away so the wildebeest couldn’t use our car as shelter.

But before you start envisioning us reveling in the wildebeest’s misery, know that it’s not always that easy to maintain our standards of ethics. Remaining uninvolved doesn’t just mean failing to rescue a dying wildebeest. It also means standing idly by when a male lion attacks the hyena den, searching for cubs to kill because they are his future competitors. When that happens, there is nothing we can do but curse at the lion and watch and hope that he comes up empty-handed. If he does, that’s another victory for Team Hyena. If he doesn’t…well, death is as big a part of life here in the Mara as is birth—it has to be to keep the system running smoothly. Today, that meant one fewer wildebeest. Tomorrow the sun will rise again and the bell will toll for someone else. I just hope it’s not someone from Team Hyena.

Moss guards her dead cub

This morning we came across an old female named Moss who was guarding her cub that had clearly just been killed within the preceding couple of hours. Watching this is one of the saddest things imaginable; Moss repeatedly tried to groom her cub and wake it up, but to no avail. We do not know what had killed the cub, but it had blood on its neck. Photo taken by MSU student Audrey Derose-Wilson.