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Bird Call – November 2003

At a kill in the Kruger

Interpretation is a culmination of key chapters of life in the African bush. Everything fits together, everything is there for a reason, and everything has a function or role within the ‘big picture’.

My many years guiding international visitors to the Kruger has provided me with fantastic opportunities to explore some of the aspects of this bigger picture. During November I, along with my guests, witnessed some extraordinary examples of animal behaviour. A female leopard and her cubs with their porcupine kill, and two lionesses at their impala kill.

The leopard’s patience!

There were two reasons why we waited two and a half hours for a leopardess with to come and fetch her porcupine kill metres away from our vehicle.

The first reason is that we wanted to see a leopard close up, and the second reason was I knew she would return. This story is about the reasons I knew she would come back and fetch her porcupine kill.

She had cubs with her (about a year old) and her success rate for large mammals (I consider the porcupine as relatively large) is not very good. Female leopards on territory need priority access to that area’s resources in order to raise their cubs. She is the only one that can ensure the proper development and education her cubs will need in order to survive. The ‘resources’ in the area do not make it easy – in fact they make it extremely difficult for mom leopard to teach hunting techniques, and how to kill effectively – even if it’s a porcupine.

Food defends itself in the bush, and this particular rodent – the porcupine – can make a lasting point about defence.

The kill must have happened in the early hours of the morning, we arrived while the mother and her two cubs were beginning to feed – only a bite to the back of the neck of the porcupine was visible. We arrived at the same time as another vehicle – and all the leopards ran off. I switched off the vehicle and began to wait – this leopard would not leave her kill, I knew that, and a test of who’s resolve and patience would snap first. The odds were in my favour that she would come back while we were still waiting – all other vehicles had left at this point. The sun was coming up, and the carcass would begin to send out messages to vultures and hyenas soon. The leopard had cubs to look after.

It took 2 hours for the leopard to return the 60 metres she needed to fetch the porcupine. We were still there and my guests got some really good observation – particularly about the patience and ability of a leopard to disappear into the grass 10 metres from you!

Have you got the stomach to watch dung beetles?

Hungry lionesses hunting and a young impala ewe ruminating, the herd watchful but in this instance, not attentive enough – and then suddenly there’s a warning, the ox-peckers fly up into the air shouting, impalas scrabble to their feet and scatter, jumping high up over the brush, kicking their hind legs vertically and barking out warnings – all except one impala – the one that wasn’t fast enough. The first lioness grabbed her from out of the grass and the second lioness hanging on her hindquarters. There was only time for one last bleat before finality, a sporadic jerking of the legs, a better grip by one of the lionesses and then she was ripped apart like the rope tearing in a tug-of-war dual.

Each lioness took their share and panting, crouched over the spoils to eat. That’s when we arrived, along with a lone male hyena that was in the right place in the right time. The lionesses were 10 feet from us when they began feeding.

The impala was barley recognisable after just ten minutes, she was young enough for her skull, vertebrae and other skeletal features to be crushed and swallowed, her skin was peeled away and her hooves bitten off. The lioness with the intestinal stomachs pulled out the rumen, still full of freshly cropped grass and leaves, and with her incisors, split the wall and emptied the contents next to her.

The smell was immediate, sending messages out into the bush. First to arrive were the dung beetles flying in one after the other, landing on the lionesses, next to the lioness and all about the lioness like fighter pilots grounding their planes. They were on a mission, and what a mission – as the lioness was finishing off the last bloody remains – the dung beetles were rolling away their balls of freshly dumped impala stomach contents, across the track and away – the grass was still producing opportunities for life even although it had been neatly cropped by an impala nearly sixty minutes earlier.

My own fascination with what was going on was immediate – as the vultures circled above us I began to understand just how important it was for me to witness this complete cycle of life.

I needed to put some perspective on what was happening around me, I mean – here I was, sitting my vehicle watching an undigested ball of grass and leaves from an impalas stomach, being rolled away by a dung beetle in order to provide a home for the life of a new dung beetle. I’m sure the impala would argue the finer parts of the importance of her role in all of this but I could not help wondering in awe at how all of this was so perfectly pieced together.

I had a lot of players (the dung beetle was obviously the roll model) all acting out phenomenal sequence of events that I had to interpret for my guests who were all waiting for me to say something.
I quickly assessed some of the things I could talk about;

The importance of grass – as a producer – the importance of the impala – as a grazer (in this instance because it grazes and browses) and the relationship between them – the importance of grass not only as a source of food but also as material for shelters and nesting material, and as this ball of impala stomach contents rolled passed me – as material that would provide a nuptial chamber for the larva of a dung beetle who will eat, pupate and moult into another healthy, fully grown dung beetle.

“The Scarabaeoidea are ecologically important creatures. They are nature’s very own ‘poop scoops’. Without these little insects, there is a good chance that humans and the rest of Earth’s terrestrial organisms would be up to their neck in shit.” I thought.
I could have said that, or that dung beetles belong to the family Scarabaeidae and are also known as scarabs. “They are scavengers, which feed on dung and other decaying organic matter, and play an invaluable role in keeping the veld clean. The ancient Egyptians revered them as a symbol of renewed life!” I said that out loud, and as I did I thought about the grass again. I kept coming back to the grass – I remembered reading about the digestibility of grass by its fibre content – this time by how quickly the impala was killed by the lion – my guests laughed at the irony, and then one said, “you must talk to us more about grass and its ecology,” and I was impressed – the excitement and action of a lion kill was slowly being worked into the bigger picture…

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