Social media posts are a great way of finding out about animal sightings at a nature reserve. I belong to several Addo Elephant Park (AEP) groups that I monitor several times a day even if I don’t intend leaving my house. It’s fun to know what other people are looking at.
If I am lucky enough to be in the AEP, well, then I take my monitoring a lot more seriously. The problem is that reception is not great in large sections of the park. You have to look for messages whenever you reach higher parts of the landscape or a camp.
I routinely make an institutional stop to check WhatsApp groups at the intersection of the main route in the park with the provincial road that runs along Addo Heights. It’s a good place for a brief stop because it is about halfway through the main section and cellphone reception is generally acceptable.
On my last visit to AEP, I made my usual stop at the crossroads and saw that the Addo Sightings group bristled with messages about seven hyenas at Rooidam – a small dam on the northern edge of the main section. One brief communication said that hyenas and jackals were fighting each other over a dead kudu in the dam. Wow, that is potentially very exciting.
The problem was that messages were two hours old by the time I received them and it would take about an hour to drive the 18kms to Rooidam. In fact, usually it takes much longer because there are several places along the way where I like to linger and take in the surroundings. Often there are a few good sightings on the way.
I pressed on, keeping below the 40km/h speed limit and not stopping unless I really had to give way to wildlife. When I was about ten minutes from Rooidam, an oncoming car stopped so we could exchange information about our respective latest sightings. The driver told me that there was still a hyena at the dam.
As I approached Rooidam, it was obvious that something interesting was afoot – three cars had stopped in the parking apron and binoculars were being passed back and forth between their occupants.
I saw it immediately, on the far side of the dam a hyena was in the water tugging on something. It was quite far away – perhaps 80 metres or so. I whipped out my binoculars to confirm the sighting and sure enough a hyena was chewing on the face of a nearly submerged kudu bull.
The dam must be shallow at that part as the hyena was able to stand on the bottom and easily keep its shoulders dry. The kudu’s muddy head with its signature cork-screw horns protruded above the water even when the hyena released it.
The hyena must have already eaten a lot by the time I got there because it was not ravenously gulping down chunks of meat as they usually do. It was rather gingerly picking the kudu’s face for tasty bits. A few times it made a half-hearted attempt to drag the antelope’s waterlogged carcass towards the bank but it was either too heavy or had become snagged on some underwater obstacle
I scanned the bank closest to the hyena and spotted a black-backed jackal lying in the sand. He watched the hyena in frustration but dared not enter the dam. I have never seen a jackal eating in the water – not in my personal experiences nor in any of the videos I love to watch. The jackal seemed resigned to waiting it out.
Hyenas have never seemed bothered about hunting or socialising in water. In June last year, Real Safari Newsletter carried a story about two hyenas that had hunted a male kudu into Gwarrie Pan, only two km from Rooidam. Read that story here.
Perhaps local hyenas have developed a strategy for chasing kudus into waterholes and killing them while they were swimming for their life.
I have no information about how that particular animal in Rooidam had met its end. Nobody reported a hunt on social media, but I believe it is safe to assume that hyenas had chased it there. Once they had made their kill they could not drag it out so they feasted in the water, squabbled with each other and fought off the jackals.
While I was trying to work out how to take pictures at that distance, or at least get some kind of useful image that I could put in the newsletter, two more hyenas slunk out from behind some bushes. They did not appear to be ravenous, perhaps because they had feasted on the kudu earlier, as they slowly slouched up to the water’s edge.
You could almost hear them thinking, “Is it worth getting wet again? Am I really that hungry?”
OK, I don’t think that a hyena has ever put it in those terms – but, you know, along those lines.
I took many photos knowing full well that I would never get a sharp image at that distance. I could crop the picture, try to sharpen it a little but the hyena was simply out of range. My 70-200mm lens would not be enough, but I clicked on anyway. Fuzzy pics can still bring back good memories, right?
A second jackal appeared out of a bush which provided a slight diversion for the hyenas. One chased the new arrival at a leisurely walking pace. It wasn’t a really chase, more just like a reflex action. That’s what hyenas do. Then it wandered off up the hill, probably looking for a good bush where it could have a siesta.
The hyena on the bank slowly entered the water and waded to the carcass, but it couldn’t really bring itself to eat. It just stood there for a while and stared at the dead antelope before it changed its mind and left the dam. It wasn’t that hungry so it too wandered up the hill.
The remaining hyena climbed out of the dam but did not go wandering. The first jackal was still there, lying in the sand, bidding its time.
The hyena could not leave the meal for the jackal, so he walked up to it and made it leave the area. Then he promptly threw himself down onto the sand and set himself up as the official hyena guardian of the kill.
I waited around for a while, hoping that for some reason or the other the hyenas would decide to walk by our way. I knew it wasn’t going to happen so I just enjoyed the sighting.
Elephant calf struggles to drink
The hyenas and jackals stole the show for that visit but I also had a beautiful sighting of a baby elephant trying to drink water at the Marion Baree waterhole. It struggled to get its trunk to stretch down the steep bank.
Mother elephant stood right by her calf and she could reach down into the water, albeit with some difficulty. The baby even tried kneeling on the muddy banks of the waterhole while trying its best not to slip into the water.
I took a series of very cute photographs, but at the same time I was surprised. We always think of elephants as particularly intelligent animals – but not in this case. If the elephant cow and her calf had merely walked around to the other side of the waterhole, they both could have reached the water without any difficulty at all.
It was not far, and other young elephants had walked around without any problems. Perhaps elephants are not always as sharp as we like to think they are.
So ends the 52nd edition of the Real Safari Newsletter. Yes, I have been publishing this rough guide to game drives for a year already.
I welcome ideas on how to take the newsletter forward. Should I change the way I write it? Is there a particular type of information that you would like, or should I change the focus. What about charging a subscription fee to help cover the costs of the newsletter?
Please share your thoughts with me and don’t worry, I can take criticism, I have a thick skin from many years of journalism.