Adventures

Totally exhausted from being in camp all alone! Somehow I just can’t get enough sleep or enough time to nap even. Took one morning to sleep in and felt great- got ten hours in! However I blew it by staying up late that evening hanging out with Chris, Amanda, David, and Ema (two other water researchers who are staying with the Majis).

Then the night before last night some hippos were being ridiculously loud. I really wanted to strangle them. Hippos make a wide array of noises. They usually start off with this high pitched whining shriek that is also kind of like a horse whinny or a rhino squeal. This then lowers down and fades into a series of angry surly grunts. This hippo must have been right outside camp- or perhaps there were two, but it was SUPER CRAZY loud. Argh. However I was just awake enough to notice the whoops and snarls in-between the deafening hippo screams. In my half awake state my brain told me that I had to ignore the hippos in order to figure out what the hyenas are doing, listening to the hyenas was an important job. My brain did not quite wake up enough to remind myself that I should just put my head under a pillow, ignore the hippos, hyenas, and snarling cat, and just go to sleep. Anyway in the morning Philimon said the hippos were probably fighting with the buffalo. Apparently buffalo get all huffy about hippos invading their space every night. And the snarling cat was a leopard who had killed an impala that they hyenas wanted to steal. Needless to say I slept fitfully! And fitful sleep produces lots of dreams about… rhinos. Totally random. But the rhino dreams turned about the prophetic because I saw a rhino while driving around that morning. It was being very chill until a plane flew over and it freaked out and ran into the thicket. Didn’t get too close a look at it because there were 3 hyenas 200m away that I needed to ID.

Maruti needs a new fuel pump, apparently all the repeated bangs in the gas tank have finally taken their toll. Laragin says the fuel pump has probably slowly been dying. Anyway he actually beat the dents out of the tank so maybe now the fuel guage will be more reliable too! The tank had been shrunk by a good 1/3 in size.

Den scenes have started to get a little boring because I know all the cubs now and playing isn’t a CI so there isn’t much to record. Watching cubs play is fun and sometimes they are ridiculously cute but mostly they just hop in the den, hop out of the den, run around and look at things then scurry back into the den. So it’s just a lot of in and out of sight CIs.

I will say that watching a mother hyena nurse her cubs is one of the most mentally satisfying things ever. Conversely watching a cub that wants to nurse but can’t is probably one of the most frustrating. Cubs put their ears flat back and make a noise we called a squitter, a whiny crying noise, when they beg their moms to nurse. Hearing a cub squitter is like hearing a baby cry; it’s like nails on a chalkboard. I want to shout out “for the love of god will someone please sack out and nurse that cub!”

At north den we have TREX who is a low-ranking new mom. Both her cubs have made it to 9 weeks now and are looking good though Clever Girl is definitely smaller than Shooter. Normally a new mom won’t successfully raise two cubs, especially a lower-ranking one so its great to see them both still alive. However Clever and Shooter are having some serious nursing issues. Cubs usually settle dominance pretty early on and the dominant cub will always take the preferred nursing position (parallel to mom) while the subordinate cub nurses by mom’s tail. In Clever and Shooter’s case, Shooter won’t let Clever nurse at all. It was hard to watch Shooter biting Clever until Clever finally just sat up and meandered away looking depressed. It’s hard to stay emotionally disconnected from the animals sometimes and Shooter was being so mean to Clever that I really wanted TREX to interfere and stop nursing Shooter. But it may be that TREX simply isn’t producing enough milk for the two of them such that when Clever starts nursing alongside Shooter, neither of them get very much milk. Since TREX is a low ranking female (and she’s been lame on her front left leg for over a month now) this isn’t too surprising. Clever Girl is an adorable little cub though so I really hope she makes it!

Siblicide does occur in hyenas but not as often as was originally thought. Usually when there’s only one cub the other cub may have died during birth, or the mother wasn’t able to produce enough milk and the subordinate one starves. Most siblings I see are best buds and when they graduate the den they often stick together.

Happy Zebra den was having some sibling nursing issues also, but not between the two nursing cubs! Pike and her daughter Eremet both have new babies at the den and the mom daughter pair are almost always at the den together, looking exhausted. (Pike now has 6 grandchildren!) A few nights ago Pike’s youngest daughter (only just a year old this January) had showed up at the den. Hyena moms usually nurse their cubs for over a year so Claymore got weaned very young to make room for Pike’s two new cubs. High-ranking animals usually get weaned a little younger because their mom can support them at carcasses and switch them over to meat more easily. Erem is also very young for her first litter at 2 years old, most hyenas won’t have cubs until they’re 3 to 5 years old.

Anyway since younger sisters are higher-ranking than older sisters Claymore is higher ranking than her older sister Eremet. Eremet was sacked out trying to nurse her new babies when Clay shows up and starts groaning her head off. Groaning is the noise a hyena makes, usually around cubs, to mean “hey I’m a friend, I won’t hurt you, I just want to sniff you.” I don’t know if it’s because Clay is so young and her sister is to but Clay just could not leave Pike, Erem, and their cubs alone. Any time a cub moved Clay would quickly turn around and groan and groan and sniff it. It seemed like Clay couldn’t understand that she’d been replaced by all these little babies and couldn’t understand why her older sister, who used to spend so many hours playing with her and rough housing her, was now being so boring. Pike finally chased Clay away and bit her a few times which stopped Clay from annoying Pike and but only made it worse for Eremet. Clay didn’t seem to comprehend that the cubs were hungry and wanted to eat, she seemed absolutely fascinated by the fact that Erem was producing milk because each time the cubs would start to suckle Clay would sniff and lick at Erem’s nipples. Groaning, like squittering, can start to sound extremely annoying when a hyena keeps it up for a long period. I wanted to shout at Clay, “stop groaning and go away! They don’t want you here! You’re being annoying!” 

And poor Erem couldn’t do a thing about it, each time Clay stood on top of Erem to sniff and lick her, her cubs would run away into the den, and Erem would look so distressed. Erem’s cubs are very tiny and very black, and at such a young age they need all the milk they can get! I had to remind myself that Clay wouldn’t hang out forever and when I came back the next night I was happy to see Erem nursing two happy and relaxed cubs. Clay’s my favorite happy zebra sub but she almost lost that status that night I was so annoyed with her! Part of me feels sorry for her though; all the other cubs in her cohort still have the attention of their moms while Clay is now all on her own!

When it comes to sibling relations hyenas can be a lot like humans, at times best friends, sometimes annoying the heck out of each other, and sometimes they won’t stop fighting!