project updates
Brown Hyena Research Project
Newsletter - December 2009
Read the latest newsletter.
Newsletter - September 2009
Obelixa is acting strange, Tosca is breeding and Alaika pulled her collar off!
Read more in the latest newsletter
Newsletter - September 2008
After a long life, Ray finally died of natural causes at the end of June. While this is sad news, the team must move on and collar another hyaena at Bogenfels. Meanwhile Maya gave us a fright - we thought she was dead, but it turns out her cubs were being naughty and had chewed the collar off!
Read the full newsletter here.
Newsletter - June 2008
Read all about Minerva, Ray, Oona and 737 - all hyenas living in Namibia - and a couple more in the Czech Republic! All in the latest newsletter.
Newsletter - March 2008
The spotted hyena sightings are going well, brown hyenas Ray, Caspar and Rodin were all seen, but numbers are down at Sylvia Hill. Read more in the latest newsletter.
The Brown Hyena Project has branched out and has collared its first spotted hyena. It also rescued a brown hyena trapped insited the Marco Fishing property and relays news of Tosca and her collar. Read more in the latest newsletter.
Newsletter - June 2007
A 10th attempt at darting a hyena ends well! Read more in the latest newsletter.
Newsletter - March 2007
Exciting discoveries regarding the inland hyena population, sad news about the death of Emma and yet another attempt at collaring a Hottentot Bay hyena - all this and more in the latest newsletter.
Newsletter - December 2006
The last newsletter for 2006 details the bizarre disappearance of the Hottentot hyena clan, the sad death on the roads of Remus, and a dariting success at Gabusib. Click here to download the full newsletter in PDF format.
Newsletter - September 2006
Ingrid and the team discover something strange is afoot with the Peninsula Clan - Tosca has cubs! Click here to download the full PDF newsletter.
From Newsletter - June 2006
There's good and bad news in Ingred's latest newsletter - click here to download the PDF file to read.
March 2006
From Ingred's newsletter: We finally managed to dart one of the Bogenfels hyenas. The trip was planned for four nights with Gino Noli and René Rossler joining Hartmut Winterbach and myself. As so many times before, the first night was unsuccessful, but when Hartmut and I returned to camp, we spotted a brown hyena feeding on a seal close to the seal colony. We needed to take our chances and approached the animal. It was not aware of our presence, although all the jackals that tried to get some bits and pieces of the hyena's food ran away as soon as they saw us. However, the hyena was too busy with its prey and Hartmut was able to dart it quickly. The hyena ran into the hummocks and after darting him a second time, went down nicely. Floppy, which will be his name from now on, is a 10-year-old male in a good condition. He had a pretty deep wound on his hind leg, but it seemed to heal nicely. Bite marks in the neck also indicated that he must have been involved in a fight just recently, but otherwise he appeared to be in a good condition for his age. He had some old, but healed fractures in his front legs, which explains why he was limping a bit when we first spotted him.
An interesting insight is that the conservation status of brown hyena in Namibia is "insufficiently known (vulnerable or endangered)" which indicates the shortage of data on the animal. The distribution of sighting forms in Namibia by the Project will hopefully be able to acquire a better picture of numbers.
October 2005
We started working in inland areas of the Sperrgebiet this year and the preliminary results are amazing. After retrieving Alfie's collar which dropped off at the correct time, we could work out what Alfie had been doing for the past five months. We downloaded more than 14 000 GPS locations from his collar, and weren't surprised to find out that Alfie only used the waterhole in the Kaukasib, where we fitted the collar, before it rained in his 'real' territory and water was available there. What was surprising was that he had visited the Baker's Bay seal colony twice during the five months; this was unexpected because the colony is not within his territory and is in fact quite far away, not even within his home range. When going there, Alfie went straight toward it, not stopping to forage along the beaches on the way.
We will fit four additional brown hyenas with GPS collars there in October/November this year and also got funding to fit four coastal brown hyenas with such collars. I'm very excited about using this technology and the comparison of our VHF telemetry results with the GPS telemetry ones.
March 2006
From Ingred's newsletter: We finally managed to dart one of the Bogenfels hyenas. The trip was planned for four nights with Gino Noli and René Rossler joining Hartmut Winterbach and myself. As so many times before, the first night was unsuccessful, but when Hartmut and I returned to camp, we spotted a brown hyena feeding on a seal close to the seal colony. We needed to take our chances and approached the animal. It was not aware of our presence, although all the jackals that tried to get some bits and pieces of the hyena's food ran away as soon as they saw us. However, the hyena was too busy with its prey and Hartmut was able to dart it quickly. The hyena ran into the hummocks and after darting him a second time, went down nicely. Floppy, which will be his name from now on, is a 10-year-old male in a good condition. He had a pretty deep wound on his hind leg, but it seemed to heal nicely. Bite marks in the neck also indicated that he must have been involved in a fight just recently, but otherwise he appeared to be in a good condition for his age. He had some old, but healed fractures in his front legs, which explains why he was limping a bit when we first spotted him.
An interesting insight is that the conservation status of brown hyena in Namibia is "insufficiently known (vulnerable or endangered)" which indicates the shortage of data on the animal. The distribution of sighting forms in Namibia by the Project will hopefully be able to acquire a better picture of numbers.
October 2005
We started working in inland areas of the Sperrgebiet this year and the preliminary results are amazing. After retrieving Alfie's collar which dropped off at the correct time, we could work out what Alfie had been doing for the past five months. We downloaded more than 14 000 GPS locations from his collar, and weren't surprised to find out that Alfie only used the waterhole in the Kaukasib, where we fitted the collar, before it rained in his 'real' territory and water was available there. What was surprising was that he had visited the Baker's Bay seal colony twice during the five months; this was unexpected because the colony is not within his territory and is in fact quite far away, not even within his home range. When going there, Alfie went straight toward it, not stopping to forage along the beaches on the way.
We will fit four additional brown hyenas with GPS collars there in October/November this year and also got funding to fit four coastal brown hyenas with such collars. I'm very excited about using this technology and the comparison of our VHF telemetry results with the GPS telemetry ones.
Newsletter - December 2007
