The road ahead of us is scuffed with tracks where early this morning, hyenas tangled with giraffes. As Sharon Haussmann stops the vehicle to make sense of what she sees on the ground, she scans the bush for movement. We are parked opposite the den site she discovered in early June. Within minutes, two curious faces have emerged from the termite mound.
“There they are,” says the Hoedspruit-based owner of well-loved Lowveld brand Khaki Fever, her face breaking into a smile. The tiny hyenas check us out for a moment, before coming out to play in the late afternoon sun. Sharon knew they were there and when they would emerge. “Hyenas have their routines, just like we do,” she explains as the pups begin to play, tackling each other and tumbling through clouds of golden dust.
They are offspring of a big clan of hyenas in the South Western part of Greater Kruger’s Balule Nature Reserve, where Sharon has been living for the last six years. The clan has split but she knows them all. “These babies have different mothers,” she says of the six and eight week old furballs. One is still black, while the other is just starting to get spots from the neck down.
Moving from White River to live on the family property in Balule in June 2011, Sharon’s hyena fascination was fueled by the discovery of a den close to her house. Her childhood affinity for these misunderstood apex predators was rekindled and she started recording their calls. Hyenas have about 14 vocalisations – possibly more based on her recordings – and she recognises most of them.
Soon after she started hanging out at the den, one hyena caught her attention. He was about the same size as the two we are watching, but his left back leg was missing. There are documented cases of hyenas losing limbs in fights for dominance, but none of cubs. She wondered what had happened to this little one, and if he would survive.
The amateur naturalist began spending more time at the den. “Tripod’s mom would leave and I couldn’t. He’d lie next to me sleeping. I’d email and work and just be with him. It got so bad that I had to see him twice a day.” As Tripod developed and grew, Sharon’s intellectual curiosity evolved into an emotional investment in this small, three legged hyena and his family.
“I literally went into a depression when the hyenas moved,” she explains as we wait for the cubs’ moms’ to return. Alert to every twitch of an ear or change in their body language, she can sometimes smell a hyena before she can see it. The hyenas tonight are late though, so Sharon talks some more about Tripod. Her diary is dotted with posts about him; “I find it hard to express in words what it has been like for me to observe and follow Tripod’s development… I live with a constant urge and eagerness to spend time at the den.”
She lyrically describes the sense of awe and connection she nurtures with the world around her while hanging out with the hyenas; cherishing the chirping of a Stierling’s Wren Warbler, or the Double Banded Sandgrouses’ gentle crepuscular call…
She contacted hyena experts like Kim Wolhuter and Gus Mills with questions based on her observations; what are genetic studies showing about their spot patterns and why has evolution selected for their unique reproductive organs…?
“The more I learnt, the more I wanted to know,” she says, filling dozens of notebooks over the years. She’s documented incredible encounters between hyenas and wild dogs, watched them for days on an elephant kill, observed their complex mating, witnessed females drop their pups into the sheltering earth and spent hours, “surrounded by hyenas, in the dark, on my own…their constant sounds, their movements and even their smell a part of every breath I take”.
Today, sightings of Tripod are few and far between as he runs “free and wild – exactly what I was hoping for”. She’s more passionate than ever though about hyenas and their vital role in a healthy ecosystem. She’s viewed them all over the world, from the deserts of Namibia to the Aberdares in Tanzania but just laughs and shakes her head when I suggest she is a bit of an expert.
As easy as it would have been, Sharon has never touched or reached out for Tripod or any other hyenas, despite their incredible acceptance of her presence. She’s made it a firm rule to interact with them on their terms and avoid anthropomorphising them. Nonetheless there is a relationship between them that that brings her out night after night.
“You can sense so much if you tune in to the natural world and as your senses develop, this enhances your experience of everything in your life,” she observes as we leave our two pups, still waiting for their moms.
More than just hyenas, I think, we have been looking for something missing in our own lives; time to be in the moment perhaps, a renewed appreciation for the animal in us, or maybe even a space to heal our own estrangement from the wild? Truths seem heightened during this threshold between day and night and later, when the hyenas start to call, I glimpse the beauty in Sharon’s communion with Tripod that has enriched her life, but is fundamental to us all.
