Disconnecting

The above photo is my favourite hyena photo of all for reasons more than its aesthetic appeal. It’s a photo of Willi and his mother, Hadha Kamar, standing on a garbage mound in the sunrise, listening for the arrival of the next truckload of garbage. The sun in Harar rises up from the Somali desert and when it’s close to ground level it shines blood-red. The photo doesn’t quite capture the blood-redness of the rising sun but, take my word for it, it’s very red. For me, to see the sun rise over hyenas sorting through garbage is a beautiful thing because of what it signifies: resilience. Hyenas have been touted as a reliable indicator species in that, if your hyenas disappear, then its a pretty good bet that your ecosystem is in serious trouble. The thing is that in Harar there is not much of what you would call an ecosystem left. Polluted streams cut through exhausted, eroded soils, piling plastic bags against their banks and refracting the colours of the rainbow in their greenish, oily waters. Introduced eucalypts grow in stands, sucking the moisture out of the ground, banning any growth below their canopies and, where there are no trees, the goats see to it that nothing can grow beyond a millimetre high. The only wild animals are the birds that eat the seeds of the Afkolo (the weed that dominates the landscape), the monkeys that steal from the farms and of course, the hyenas. It’s beautiful. No matter how far you degrade your landscape, the hyenas will persist and Hadha Kumar’s boy, Willi, is proof of that. I’ve watched him develop and learn his way around the old town, finding food and avoiding people and making a home for himself beside the polluted stream in amongst the rushes. And most mornings, he’s at the garbage dump rummaging through the waste that the urban population produces and finding plenty of food to survive on. Sorry if it’s not the vast savannah of the imagination, coursing with wildebeest and zebra, where hyenas compete with lions over kills and the only biped is the ostrich. There are too many people in Africa for that dream to be realised in anything other than a pipe. I love hyenas and I don’t care where they get their food from, as long as they live long and prosper and the above photo tells me that, in Harar at least, they will do just that.

This is my last post for the foreseeable future. I’m going back to Australia to write a thesis and probably won’t be back in Harar for some considerable time, if ever. I went to the hyena feeding place last night and, before saying my goodbyes to Yusuf and his family, went outside to say goodbye to the hyenas. Dibbey was lying beside the drainage channel looking peaceful. She’s never been aggressive towards me unless I happened to be sitting near to the food bucket so that it was a very peaceful moment saying goodbye to that big, normally angry hyena. And of course, Tukwondilli was just around the corner from Dibbey with god knows what going through that mixed up mind of his. Then there was Burisee, formerly Fintamuree, looking very happy with herself. I went over and scratched her chin and then gave her Willi’s comb, which she took in her mouth and then dropped as if not knowing what to do with it. Things have changed so much in the past six months. Bebe is gone, Jalla is gone and now Willi is absent most nights. Shebo and Funyamure have both disappeared. No wonder hyenas are so unsentimental, the way they disappear and die off, but it’s harder for a human to deal with it. I like to think that Willi had a chink in his armour and that just occasionally he was glad to see me and that, should I ever come to Harar and find him sorting through the garbage, he would come ambling over with that funny, waddling walk of his and stand in front of me the way he did, not knowing what to do. That’s the thing about our two species; is that we just don’t know how to connect with each other, but what was so remarkable about Willi was that he really, really tried to. Goodbye, Hyenas.

For Hashim II

Sorry to say that my friend Hashim died yesterday of his wounds. The body is being returned to Harar for burial. Thanks too for your kind words.

Right now some cracks are opening up in Harar. Some people have been reacting violently and the ethnic divisions are coming to the fore. The Unesco prize for the city of peace and tolerance is a little bit misplaced at the moment and it’s a relief to be leaving tomorrow.

For Hashim

Yesterday, my friend Hashim Idris was shot twice in the head by a gunman in Feres Magala (in the middle of the old town). Right now he’s in a coma in a hospital in Addis Ababa where the medical staff are waiting for the bleeding in his brain to subside. Nobody is sure if he’ll recover and if he does, how badly he’ll be affected by his injuries.
Last year, while I was walking with hyenas, Hashim saw to it that the municipality provided me with the shop space that I needed to come and go in the middle of the night and to interview people in a neutral setting. Not only that, he sat at his window at night, above the main market, and recorded the comings and goings of the hyenas and contributed greatly to my research. His family are lovely and I really hope that his wife and kids will have him back in one piece very soon. Hashim, may you be as tough and unstoppable as waraba and make a swift recovery.

The Unseen II

Whenever I start thinking that nothing blogworthy is happening at the hyena place, something blogworthy inevitably occurs. Last night was just such a night. All the usual hyenas were there and being slightly more aggressive with each other than usual but not remarkably so. Tukwondilli scared the guff out of an Ethiopian tourist who was already nervous so that when the slightly insane male hyena ran straight at him to get to a place, safe from aggressive females, the tourist fell sprawling on the ground in his desperate effort to get away. Hilarious but not worth writing about at length. What was remarkable last night was the attendance at the feeding place of a family from Hargeysa in Somaliland. There was a middle aged couple and their teenage daughter and they were accompanied by an old woman who was apparently a healer. It turned out that they were on their way to Dire Dawa 50kms further on from Harar to find treatment for their daughter who was disturbed. It wasn’t very obvious to me that the daughter was disturbed she seemed pretty normal, but for some reason the family believed she was possessed by a jinni. Maybe she’d been acting strangely back in Hargeysa. The girl stood near the fence and was nervous of the hyenas but not especially so and nowhere near as much as the man who had just entertained everyone with his unabashed panic. Yusuf called to the girl to come and feed and she eventually did so, holding the stick with the meat on it which Hadha Kamar gratefully took and ate. Then the girl finished and went over to her parents and the family left.
Diagnosis: The girl did not have a jinni. If she was possessed she would have cried out and been very afraid of the hyenas, which she wasn’t, so the family will have to look elsewhere for the cause of their daughter’s problems. This is the third such attempt at exorcism by hyena that I have seen since I came to Harar. The first one was a small Somali boy who was sent with his family by a sheikh in Djibouti. On that occasion, the boy was very afraid and did cry out and was apparently cured. The second was a young woman who was crying and whimpering while her family physically forced her to feed the hyenas. In that case the family wasn’t forceful enough and, while the woman cringed and sobbed, gave up on the exorcism for the night and reassured her that they would try again the following night. At the time I didn’t know that they were performing an exorcism so it looked to me like a family of tourists going to great lengths to ensure that their daughter had the full Harar experience. But as far as exorcisms go, hyena-based ones are pretty harmless and no-one gets hurt apart from the unfortunate ox or camel, whose meat is used in the feeding. And of course the jinni cops a beating but we don’t see that bit.

Getting bigger, sinking lower

The above photo of Yusuf and his hyenas looks pretty unremarkable. Well, it does if you’re accustomed to seeing someone feeding hyenas on a nightly basis. But it’s a telling and depressing photo when you know who the hyenas are. The one standing behind Yusuf is Willi and the ones in front are Burisee (formerly Fintamuree) and Dibbey (nearest the camera). Burisee is most likely Kooti’s cub and, when your mother is the highest ranking hyena in the clan, you get to feed undisturbed. Hence Dibbey, who is extremely aggressive and much bigger than Burisee, is standing beside the younger, smaller hyena and letting her do as she pleases. Dibbey’s rank is about three quarters of the way up the hierarchy of the clan and she knows her place. Dibbey also used to leave Willi well alone as his mother, Hadha Kumar, ranks about fourth highest and while Willi was a cub, he enjoyed the privileges that his mothers rank brought him. But little hyenas become big hyenas and, as a male reaches sexual maturity, his ranking slips away from him so that by the time he is sexually mature, he finds that, while he still ranks above all of those other males that he always outranked, his place in the overall hierarchy has dropped to below the lowest ranking female. In Willi’s case, his increasingly large testicles are causing him to become increasingly smaller fry and a target for any females that happen to have a bee in their bonnets. Dibbey has a very small bonnet that contains a lot of bees. I was speculating that Dibbey was responsible for the gaping wound that Willi had on his rump (which is now healed) a month ago and now I’m certain of that. Willi is so scared of the big female that he’s relinquished his place in front of Yusuf and has to stand behind the hyena-man waiting for food to be thrown over his shoulder. In the photo, he’s watching Dibbey and this is all that he does when they’re both present because, given any opportunity, Dibbey will attack him viciously. And worst (and saddest) of all is that he doesn’t hang around any more. I used to go and sit on the hill and Willi would amble over and sniff and try to bite or just hang out. But now after he comes to feed, he leaves straight away for the garbage dump, not feeling safe in Dibbey’s presence. I don’t really blame Dibbey, she’s just intrinsically aggressive and she’s probably expecting the young male to emigrate and find another clan in which to seek mates. But now that you have all this information, you might agree that the above is a such a very sad photograph.

Meat… your ancestors

Time for a hyena history lesson.
The hyena pictured below is Pachycrocuta brevirostris, a species that lived from 3.5 to 0.5 million years ago. These hyenas were big, really big, with the type specimen’s skull measuring 32.2 centimetres at the base. To give you an idea of just how big that is, the length for the average south African, male lion is only 29.4 cm. The massive head was on an equally massive neck, attached to a very stout body on legs built for strength, rather than speed. They say this hyena was a hyper-scavenger but, considering its size, it could probably have hunted big, slow animals.
Incidentally, the type specimen was found in Sainzelles, France. Yes, these giants were everywhere, from the British Isles to southern Africa, across to Java and northern China. And our ancestors saw their fair share of these hyenas; they migrated out of Africa at about the same time and Pachy didn’t become extinct until a million years after that.
During the 1930s at a place called Zhoukoudian in China, Archaeologists were excavating a cave known locally as ‘Dragon Bone Hill.’ the cave was full of fossilised human (Homo erectus) remains: crania, teeth, and assorted bones. The interesting thing about the crania was that they were all damaged and not found in association with their matching jaw bones and so on. Also, the holes in the bases of the skulls had been deliberately enlarged. The conclusion arrived at was that these proto-humans were head hunters. They must have preyed on their own kind and, after having killed an unfortunate individual, cut a hole in the base of the skull to extract, and probably eat, the brains contained within. It wasn’t until 60 years later that the remains were examined more closely and a lot of tooth marks were found on the damaged skulls. The tooth marks were made by a very large carnivore and guess whose fossilised remains were also found in the caves? Zhoukoudian has provided the most abundant and complete specimens of Pachycrocuta in the world. It seems the hyenas were using the caves as living spaces, dragging their unfortunate human victims home to be consumed in privacy; gnawing away at the bases of the skulls to access the lipid-rich treats that only intelligent apes can provide.

Biting the comb that grooms

Last night was our first time back at the hyena feeding place after our visit to Kenya and, after having dinner with the family and doling out the presents from Kenya, we went out to the shrine to visit the hyenas. Kooti and Juggie were in front of the shrine, pretty much dominating everything within a 10 metre radius so it wasn’t a surprise to find Willi standing on the seat beside the shrine in the shadows. I went around to where he was standing and gave him a little neck scratch and he craned his neck. This usually means he wants his chin combed so I took out a new comb and tidied up his fur. After that he wanted to chew on his new comb so I held it out for him to chew. Chomp, he bit of a quarter of the comb and let it drop from his mouth. Chomp, another quarter. Chomp, and all that was left of the comb was the little that I was holding in my hand, which I promptly dropped before he could bite my fingers. Just a few months ago, Willi would chew and chew and it would take him ages to demolish a comb, but last night I could feel the immense strength in his jaw as he sheared through the plastic. Our Willi is fast turning into a big, strong, grown-up hyena.

Hyena Tea Party

Arriving early in the morning at the garbage dump, I saw three sets of those teddy bear ears pointed at me in the gloom. The hyenas recognised me before I recognised them and stayed prostrate on the ground while I went over to a straggly-looking Habuka tree and sat on some relatively clear dirt.
One of the sets of ears rose up and its owner started walking towards me; Willi. It’s hard to describe what it feels like when a wild animal initiates contact with you for reasons other than food, but you do feel special. And Willi strolled over and then stood in front of me like a child who’s excited to see you but then doesn’t know what to do next.
After a pause, and some encouragement from me, he decided to sniff me and tried biting my sleeve. He had some gunk on his mouth from the garbage so I gently pushed him away, but I think I hurt his feelings because he went and chewed on a branch of the Habuka tree. So, feeling guilty, I produced his plastic comb and offered that to him to chew, which he did with relish. Eventually, he’d chewed so much of the comb that I let him have at it and he put the remainder between his paws and chewed it like a rib bone.
At that point, some kids came running down the track, so the hyenas left and went off to wait for the garbage truck in the relative safety of the surrounding farmland. I left too, encouraging Willi to come along so that he wouldn’t have anything thrown at him. The wound on his rump was bigger, and the hyena man said that it was someone with a muncha (sickle-headed axe) who inflicted it. Certainly looked like it was done with a blade but maybe it was another hyena bite.
Willi left his comb behind and followed and then overtook me and led me to where there were three other hyenas lying around, all facing the direction of the dump. I knew they were listening to the garbage truck, wherever it happened to be at, but my mere human hearing is not as keen as a hyena’s so it took a while before I heard the truck myself.
Once the truck had arrived and was unloading the container of trash, the hyenas were listening intently. I have no idea what there criteria are for risking a trip to the dump while there are people there but apparently the sounds coming from the dump were not promising enough and the hyenas, Willi included, got up to leave.
Following a hyena has its difficulties, not least of which is that they have no problem squeezing through small openings in thorn hedges. Once through they continue on their way, while the hapless anthropologist runs along the hedgerow looking for an opening. I found one and was through and to my surprise Willi was standing on the other side. He turned and trotted through the middle of the farmland which was towering maize a few months earlier, but which was bare at that time of year.
We came to another hedgerow and, to my relief, Willi didn’t poke his way through the smaller hole but went along the hedgerow and led me through a nice wide gap that only snagged my sleeves.
Willi broke into a canter, looking over his shoulder, and I thought he might have had enough of being followed but when I maintained a casual walk, he stopped and waited for me. Dare I say it, it was like he was giving me a hurry-on, which is pretty understandable considering the danger posed by farmers in these parts.
He led me down to the creek where it was crossed by an irrigation canal, but paused at the crossing and went back uphill to stand in some bushes. Stupidly, I assumed he was afraid to cross there out of fear of slipping off the side of the canal, so I went down to the crossing and reassured him. Hesitantly, he came down and started to cross and, when he was almost across, both he and I looked up and saw a farmer appearing at the top of the slope on the other side. Willi was off the canal like a shot and darted along the creek bed and into the cover of some bushes. The farmer, oblivious to what was going on, descended the slope and we exchanged pleasantries and he was on his way. I felt pretty guilty having reassured Willi, when he had obviously heard footsteps approaching.
I climbed the slope and waited and, before long, Willi came out of the trees and straight towards me. He sniffed at me and I let him bite my sleeve for a bit and then we were off. I was certain he wanted me to follow this time but when he dropped down into an irrigation ditch lined with trees, crawled under some branches and then disappeared, I was content to let him go. But he reappeared under the branches, coming towards me at which point a branch was dislodged and fell across his back. Willi bolted out from under his assailant with his tail between his legs and stood, staring at the branch. Then he went up and sniffed at it and touched it to make sure it was inanimate. He looked at me and crawled under the branches again and I decided to follow, clambering over the top of them. That’s how us humans traverse such obstacles.
Willi was waiting on the other side and when I was through, he led me down to a low hole in some rushes in a creek bed and disappeared into the hole. His den! I knew the main hyena den was about 50 metres downstream in the dense rushes and wild sugar cane but wasn’t aware that there were any dens in this part of the creek. But for various reasons (the creek is runoff from the town and hygeine is an issue with me; there might have been mothers and cubs in there who would be a little freaked out by the appearance of an anthropologist) I declined to follow and sat on the slope, listening to the rustling in the dense undergrowth.
That was when the most extraordinary thing happened. Willi appeared at the hole and looked at me. He came out and turned around and then disappeared into the hole once again. I sat and listened and then to my astonishment, Willi appeared again at the entrance. I couldn’t help imagining he had a child’s tea set down there and wanted me to come in for a pretend tea party. He climbed up to where I was sitting and sniffed at, and even nipped at, my face but not so fast that I couldn’t pull away. I tore off an old cornstalk and offered that and he bit down hard. Then after a little game of tug-o-war, I let him have the stalk and he went towards the hole with the stalk in his mouth, looking over his shoulder at me as he went. He disappeared into the hole once again and I decided, rather than taunt him, I should get up and leave. But on my way home through the cemetery, I couldn’t help wondering what a hyena tea party might look like.

Wishing for Fruit

This is the Masai Mara. Vast expanses of grassland and scattered trees stretching across to the escarpment that delimits the Trans Mara. We’ve been here for a mere three days and seen a lifetime’s worth of wildlife, from bushbuck to eland to elephants and all of the animals that eat them, including the Talek hyena clan, the focus of the research centre, run by Michigan State University.
Studying hyenas here is a different ballgame. For starters, park rules prevent you from getting out of your vehicle so that you can never follow the hyenas around on foot. So the entire time spent watching hyenas is done from the seat of a four wheel drive. And, as there’s nobody feeding the hyenas, there’s no predictable supply of food here, so that when you set off to study the clan, you have to go searching for individuals, rather than have them coming to you.
Last night we located and followed a hyena with a radio collar as she set off in search of food with another five hyenas in attendance. I recalled what Hans Kruuk had written about hyenas hunting zebras in groups of six and thought to myself, this would be quite a coincidence if they started hunting zebra. Then after following for half an hour, the hyenas picked up the pace and we could see black and white stripes scattering as the hyenas made a half hearted run at the zebras to see if anyone was carrying a limp or was slow to get moving. At that point we lost contact with the collared hyena and searched around for a bit in the darkness before calling it a night. Not sure whether the hyenas caught themselves a zebra but they did catch something as there were a few bloodied hyenas lazing in the sun the following morning.
One of the photos below is of a hyena that found the carcass of a Thompsons gazelle in a tree. A leopard had hung it there the previous night and left it to be returned to at a more opportune time and the hyenas caught a whiff of the dead animal. The first hyena to smell it was mature. She took a look at the carcass and quickly decided that it was too hard to access, and moved on. The second hyena was a sub-adult and, after it smelled the carcass, made a couple of circuits of the tree. It would stand on its hind legs with its front paws on the tree, looking up in hope that something would miraculously bring the carcass tumbling down from the branch where it was securely lodged. And the hyena even looked to us in the truck as if there was possibility that we might accidentally drive into the tree and dislodge the carcass. In this case, the hyena had another lesson in finding food: in the Masai Mara, don’t waste time trying to get at the fruit of the trees.

Visiting far away hyenas

We’re arrived in Addis Ababa after an 11 hour bus ride across the Rift Valley. I’ve come to realise that Ethiopians have a mortal fear of fresh air. In any vehicle, be it minibus, taxi or coach, people open the windows while they’re sitting in the vehicle, waiting for it to set off. But as soon as it starts up and makes any kind of discernible movement, the people, as a one, close all the windows lest any kind of cool breeze enter the vehicle and threaten their lives. Hence, the optimum, inside, travelling temperature for an Ethiopian transport vehicle is 40 degrees centigrade.
In three days time, we’re off to Kenya to take up an invitation to visit the hyena research project in the Masai Mara. These guys are not hack anthropologists, hanging around garbage dumps, they’re professionals with things like dart guns, radio collars and funding. So I’m keen to see some hyenas running at speed across the open savannah, in pursuit of some unfortunate ungulate, rather than slipping over in a drainage ditch in search of a bone.
Also, I can’t promise that I’ll be coming back with any amazing photos. All I have is my point-and-shoot camera and I’m not so sure the Masai Mara hyenas will be as accommodating as the Harar hyenas and stick their noses in the lens. Though you never know your luck. One German motorcycle tourist, riding across the Sudan, stopped to take some photos of a hyena in the distance. The hyena, quite graciously, came closer for some more detailed photos. Then it came closer… and closer. The Sudanese authorities found the abandoned motorcycle, (with seat half eaten) and the rider’s torn clothing and only managed to put the pieces of the puzzle together after they processed the film in the camera.