The seventh impression of Hyena Nights and Kalahari Days by Gus and Margie Mills was published last year (2021). This will give you an idea of just how popular it is because not many South African books reach a seventh edition after only eleven years.
It is an unusual book in many respects, but what really places it on a different shelf is that Gus and Margie wrote accounts from their unique points of view of the same adventure. It is one book in two distinct parts with two different authors.
Gus wrote about his experiences as a young scientist doing research on brown hyenas in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park (KGP) and later, on spotted hyenas in the same national park.
Margie’s section of the book begins with her perspective of being the wife of a researcher and a research assistant to the same person. Later on she recounts the challenges of raising two children in an isolated camp, and managing that same camp for tourists, while her husband is out following hyenas for several days at a time.
I have known about Gus Mills and his work for about 25 years. I recall interviewing him about two decades ago for a radio programme that I was doing about hyenas. At that time, he was already working at the Kruger National Park doing research on the larger predators in the best known park in the country, but he was still widely regarded as the doyen of hyena behaviour.
Hyena Nights and Kalahari Days is about his research in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park (KGP). Since he worked there in the 1970s and 80s, it has become a trans-frontier park, merging with a massive area in neighbouring Botswana. When the two parks joined, the enlarged reserve was named the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. The current size of the park is greater than that of Belgium.
So far (it’s on my bucket list), I have been to that park twice – both times in the late eighties and might even have overlapped part of the time when Gus was doing his research there – although I didn’t know it at the time.
It is a spectacular reserve in the middle of the Kalahari desert. It is unbearably hot during the day and bone-chilling cold at night. All routes within the park are still in very bad shape according to visitors posting comments in online forums. They recommend driving a 4X4 vehicle, but say that the two main roads of the park are passable in a normal sedan provided you reduce your tyre pressure.
I have often fantasised about doing adrenaline inducing research in faraway game reserves, spending the whole night taking spectacular photographs of animals in action. So it is not surprising that I bought Gus Mills’ book which is exactly about that type of experience.
The book is absorbing and his insights into the daily lives of brown and spotted hyenas are riveting. I learnt an incredible amount from his experiences, but I also found out that most of the time his work was far from thrilling.
He spent hours and hours waiting through the night sitting in his vehicle outside a hyena den. Sometimes the animals arrived and did something noteworthy for his research, but very often not much happened. On other occasions, he would follow a brown hyena through the entire night as it meandered over dunes for hours and then after daybreak, try to find his way back to camp. Remember, those were the days before everyone had GPS.
Gus mentions several times in the book that one of his goals was to change the negative impression that most people have of hyenas. I believe he is successful in this regard as the reader can’t help but feel a deeper respect for these often maligned predators.
His early years in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park (KGP) were dedicated to finding out more about the lives of brown hyenas. This was particularly interesting because generally not much is known about them.
I have only seen brown hyenas once in real life and it was at a great distance in that same park (KGP). This is not surprising because the greatest concentration of brown hyenas is in the Kalahari Desert and along the coastal regions of Namibia.
In my part of the world, the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, there are definitely brown hyenas in some of the private reserves and a few in the Addo Elephant Park (AEP) as well. I have been to the AEP dozens of times, but I have never seen a brown hyena there. Some lucky visitors have had brief a few brief sightings of the elusive species and someone even recorded a short sequence of a brown hyena on a web cam at the Main Camp.
I have also seen on YouTube, a shocking video filmed in the AEP of a brown hyena muscling in on a black-backed jackal as it was busy killing a young kudu. If you are brave enough to watch that video, the link is here:
Hyena Nights and Kalahari Days discusses many behaviour patterns of brown and spotted hyenas that were not widely known before. For example, Gus explains that it is logical for brown hyenas to be loners scavenging meals because their prey is only big enough for one animal. Spotted hyenas, on the other hand, hunt larger animals such as gemsbok or wildebeest that require cooperative efforts of several predators to bring it down.
He makes a strong case for the sense of smell and intelligence of both hyena species in the KGP. Gus insists however, that the spotted hyena is “several notches up the intelligence scale” when compared to the brown hyena and other large African carnivores such as lions, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs. He supports his argument with a fascinating tale about how two spotted hyenas were able to track down a kill eight kilometres away using only their superior senses.
Gus made some interesting observations comparing interactions between lions and spotted hyenas of the KGP with those of occurring in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. He noted that in Kalahari hyenas were far more likely to stand up to lions, and even drive them off a kill than they would in Ngorongoro. He attributed this remarkable difference to the greater abundance of prey animals in the Tanzanian crater. In the KGP prey is scarce and following the laws of supply and demand, hyenas are prepared to pay a higher price for a place at the dinner table.
The book is wonderful reading especially if you intend visiting the Kgalagadi Park in the next year or so or if you are at all interested in two of the most maligned animals in Africa – the brown and the spotted hyena.
I will have to read this one - another good book on similar research in Botswana that I have read is "Cry of the Kalahari", by Mark and Delia Owens.