One of the changes I made between my last pre-COVID African adventure and my first after COVID was focusing on videography rather than on photography to record our travels and sightings. Shooting video radically reduces the time and effort required to post something from the trip on my YouTube Channel (which I hope you’ll subscribe to!), and I decided to create a group of quickly done videos to record some of the most interesting and exciting things we saw. I’ve called them “Incident Reports”, and my intention is to post a short description of each report here on my Silver Adventurer blog to provide some background to each.
The first such report was “Incident Report: Two Wild Dog Kills, Hyenas, and a Leopard!” and it was one of the most exciting and complex wildlife interaction we’ve ever had. It was also one of the very first encounters we had on our May-June 2022 trip, so let’s explain it a bit.
Any time you find the African wild dog moving, in fact any time you find any predator moving, you can expect something to happen. We saw evidence of wild dogs hunting not long after we’d left the Tengile River Lodge, and we followed them as quickly and closely as we could. Wild dogs are a lot smaller than Land Cruisers, though, and much faster in brush, so we arrived at the kill site just as the dogs had taken the impala down. Another vehicle got lucky and was there at the time of the takedown, but they said they’d not really seen any more than we did.
Wild dog packs of ten or more, a fairly common size, will dismember a kill in less than a minute, and that’s what happened here. The dogs will compete with each other, but not really fight each other, but they’re always wary about their arch-enemies, the hyenas. They showed up almost immediately, drawn by the noise of the kill and by the fact that they tend to follow dogs on the hunt, so they’re typically not far away. One on one, a hyena is more than a match for a wild dog, and a large group of hyenas can drive even lions off a kill, but on this kill, the hyenas were outnumbered and the dogs held them off until there was nothing left but small scraps.
Our tracker said that the dogs liked to drink after eating, and he knew where to find the closest water, which of course the dogs also knew. This is a demonstration of how important it is to have skilled trackers on an adventure; we try to select ones known to be experienced, and we had the head tracker, rated as a Master, here. We went to the water hold, and sure enough the dogs were there. They’d already drunk their fill and were now playing a bit.
One impala isn’t enough to feed a pack, and so a few of the dogs were alert to noise nearby, which turned out to be another impala. A group of the dogs took it down, but it was in a ravine and we didn’t see the takedown (which is often pretty gruesome in any event!) We moved to that location and watched the dogs feeding and again fending off some hyenas successfully. When that kill had been consumed, we moved back to the water hole.
As we watched, we saw the dogs suddenly pick up their ears and move as a group to the left, into the brush. We heard a growling and the dogs yipping, and to our surprise we saw a big male leopard, who had apparently just wandered in for a drink. There were enough dogs to tree him, and keep them there, but the dogs lost interest and moved away. When they did, the leopard decided to make a break for it.
From his tree, he couldn’t see the hyenas in the area of the second kill, and he headed in that general direction. There were more than enough hyenas (about five) to tree the leopard again, this time closer to the second kill, and they kept him in the tree for a good half-hour until they also lost interest. Only one hyena remained when the leopard decided to come down, a younger one. The leopard faced him off with a snarl and made his escape.
This episode took about three hours. Other than our vehicle (we had a private vehicle), nobody stayed for the whole thing, and I don’t believe any were there at the end when the leopard came down the second time. The reason is that most safari-goers are chasing the Big Five or just ticking off animals, and they quickly move on to something else. That’s a bad idea, in my view. When predators are in motion, you stay around to see what will happen. We did, and had an incredible encounter.