National Geographic: African Odyssey Page #4

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We have three lions darted.

Another pride.

One adult male and two young females,

so it was worth it.

Nights like this bring Delia

and Mark deep satisfaction.

Using radio collars

to maintain contact,

they will spend many other long

nights recording observations.

They plot lion movements

from radio data.

Through such painstaking work,

they have discovered that,

unlike lions observed elsewhere,

prides in the Kalahari disband

in the dry season,

and individual lions

range over as much as

Their movements present a

conservation problem:

Hunters and ranchers

shoot many of the lions

in the Owenses study group when they

wander outside the reserve.

The Kalahari is so dry

that most of the time carnivores

must obtain all their

moisture from prey.

The prey, in turn, get their moisture

mainly from melons,

leaves, and grasses.

Mark, look at... If we sit tight,

maybe she'll come in.

They circle a carcass several times

because they can't afford

to make a mistake that the lions

are still close by,

because lions often kill brown

hyenas in a situation like this.

This is such a rare opportunity.

I mean most people living in Botswana

have never even seen a brown hyena.

They're so rare and they're

also so secretive and shy

that usually they run off

when they see a truck.

For the size that they are,

their jaws are incredibly powerful.

Yeah. We've actually seen them pick up

a 50 pound chunk of meat and bone

and walk three of four-miles with it

before taking it back to

the communal den as they often do.

The Owenses were the first to

discover that brown hyenas

have a very complex social structure.

At the communal den related hyenas

share in the feeding of the young

and even adopt each other's orphans.

When we first began our study

of brown hyenas in 1974,

the odd sighting suggested

that they were solitary scavengers.

Yet they lived in a clan

as a group and we couldn't understand

why they were social.

And then one night we followed

a female moving one of her cubs

from her small den into

a huge communal den.

It provides a haven for the cubs

and releases the mothers

from the duty of protection.

They move from one of these

large dens to the other,

and we don't know which one of these

dens they are using at the moment.

There are no fresh bones in this.

So often a zoologist's

hops are disappointed.

The den is empty.

To anybody else this just looks

like three big holes in the ground.

But to us this is just so many...

represents so many memories and discoveries

and hard nights of

watching empty holes

and exciting nights of watching hyenas

This place means so much to us.

It may take weeks to discover

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