South Africa - Wildlife


Wild Animals : Canines


Canines On this page are jackals and foxes so far, and also some hyaena, which aren't true canines but don't fit anywhere else yet! Black-backed jackal
	Black-backed jackal are fairly common in South Africa, and easy to spot at Kgalagadi-Gemsbok - they even come into camps at night. They quite often wander around in pairs, which is fascinating to watch - busily investigating their surroundings, acting almost as one organism.
Bat-eared foxes Sachin and I saw a documentary about these foxes on our first night at Kgalagadi-Gemsbok, and were told by the ranger how rare it was to see them. The next morning, we were extremely lucky and, thanks to some lucky spotting, stopped as a small family group came close past us. They in turn stopped to investigate us, before disappearing off again. They looked cute on the documentary, but even more amazing in real life! I was too slow to get a picture then, but saw another group later that evening, on the far side of the dry river bed below. Brown Hyaena I've only seen hyaena a few times at Pilanesburg, and always brief glimpses of solitary individuals. I don't know why exactly, but they have long been one of my favourite things to spot. Maybe because they are so elusive, their unusual matriarchal structure, and also their unusual, slightly clumsy-looking, shape. It was odd to see the way Warg riders were depicted in the second Lord of the Rings film - The Two Towers. Rather than large wolves, as in Tolkein's books, the directors chose to show them much more like large, fast and vicious hyaena (as well as going completely off the plot at that point!). In a way I thought they were quite convincing, but it was a shame - they get enough bad press as it is! Though, you can't really see it in the picture below, but this hyaena stopped and bared its teeth at us, growling in a very chilling way, that put me in mind of Saruman's Uruk-Hai more than anything else... One school of thought about human evolution is that we occupied a scavenging/gathering niche on the African plains, taking advantage of bone marrow and fats inside brain cases left on the savannah. That would have put us in competition with hyaena, although it is now thought they hunt more often previously thought. It may well be that the 'regal' lion scavenges more often from hyaena kills than vice versa.