News
December 2009 to February 2010:
Category: Default
Tosca moved her cubs to a den approximately 2 km east of the Jungle den at the end of December and therefore the camera traps were removed at the beginning of January. She was seen walking together with her two cubs next to the main road to the E-Bay mine at the beginning of February.
Gino came for the aerial downloads at the beginning of January. A friend of his, Thomas, helped him with the data downloads. They found Obelixa at E-Bay beach, walking towards the ghost town and finally settling in one of the ruins. Tosca was just west of the main road to the mine, between Atlas Bay and Wolf Bay. Both downloads went well. The next downloads are due at the end of February.
Minerva is also still denning. She’s got four cubs, approximately 9 months old.
Posted by Ingrid on February 7, 2010 at 08:18 AM
16 September to 6 November:
Category: Default
I downloaded Tosca’s and Obelixa’s data sets. Tosca moved her cubs from the bushy “Jungle Den” to a rocky cave-like den approximately 300 metres away. I’ve set up two camera traps in the area, one taking photos and the other one short video clips. Again, I get lots of nose shots and the videos haven’t captured any hyenas yet, but quite a few springbok. So far I only managed to get one photograph of Tosca carrying a seal pup carcass to the den.
Obelixa’s last download did not reveal any den site location and it is still unclear whether she is denning at the moment.
The feeding ecology study at the Wolf Bay seal colony is going to start on 15 November with the help of a student from the Polytechnic of Namibia. It has been four years since the study has been carried out last.
Posted by Ingrid on November 7, 2009 at 12:08 PM
15 September 2009:
Category: Default
All camera traps are working. So far, I did not get any good ID shots, but plenty of nose, eye and hair images (see gallery).
I downloaded Tosca's data set today. She is using a den near the Atlas Bay seal colony at present. If she stays at this den for another week, I will set-up a camera trap close by to try to capture images of the cubs. The cubs should be old enough now to spend time outside the den.
I also found Obelixa near Elizabeth Bay today. I'm still not sure whether she gave birth in the meantime and I unfortunatley could not get a visual, as she was resting inside dense, bushy vegetation.
Posted by Ingrid on September 15, 2009 at 02:04 PM
4 to 28 August 2009:
Category: Default
Manfred, the tour operator who is taking tourists to the ghost town at Elizabeth Bay, reported two sightings of Obelixa at the ghost town . She appeared to be quite tame and hesitated to move away. I drove out to investigate and also to download her data set. I found Obelixa near Bain’s Bay. She was not very disturbed by my presence, but moved to another resting site close by. She looked quite round, either well fed or highly pregnant. Maybe that’s the reason that she doesn’t want to move much…
I also set up four camera traps in the study area. Two Steathcam camera traps were recently donated by Dr. Kirk Suedmeyer. I uploaded some of the camera trap images into the gallery.
Posted by Ingrid on August 28, 2009 at 08:02 AM
18 June to 3 August:
Category: Default
I downloaded Obelixa's data in the middle of June. I found her close to the E-Bay Diamond mine, resting close to the mine's soft refuse dump.
Gino came to Aus for our aerial telemetry last week. We downloaded Tosca's and Alaika's data. I can see from the data that Tosca is definitely having cubs at the moment. Her den is close to the Atlas and Wolf Bay seal colonies.
Kirk Suedmeyer sponsored two Stealthcam camera traps. I will start using them in the Wolf Bay area next week.
Posted by Ingrid on August 4, 2009 at 07:55 AM
15 to 17 June 2009:
Category: Default
I finally managed to find Alaika near Grosse Bucht. She was resting in the mountains, close to one of Tosca’s old den sites. I received Tosca’s signal from the same area, which possibly means that she is using the den at present. I downloaded 1000 data points from Alaika’s collar. She mainly forages at the seal colonies at Wolf and Atlas Bay, but also visits the Luderitz Peninsula on a regular basis. She spends a lot of time together with Tosca.

The Brown Hyena Research Project featured on SABC’s 50/50 show on Monday night.
Posted by Ingrid on June 17, 2009 at 02:11 PM
22 May - 11 June:
Category: Default
I’ve downloaded Tosca’s and Obelixa’s data sets and managed to get Alaika’s signal twice, but haven’t been able to trigger a download yet.
An adult male brown hyena was killed on the road between Rotkop and Haalenberg. This is the third roadkill this year that I know of.
Posted by Ingrid on June 11, 2009 at 09:53 AM
21 May 2009:
Category: Default
We spent a few days at Atlas Bay, but apart from the already collared hyenas - Tosca and Alaika - we did not have much luck at the site. We went to the Peninsula instead and managed to capture Minerva again. She was fitted with a GSM collar and we retrieve data every day. Very exciting!!!
Posted by Ingrid on May 28, 2009 at 03:47 PM
4 to 20 May 2009:
Category: Default
We are in the field trying to dart and collar brown hyenas at the moment. We already managed to collar three adult females, one of them is Tosca, the breeding female of the Peninsula clan. Three more nights to go and we hope to fit two more collars.
I will report in more detail in the next newsletter...
Posted by Ingrid on May 20, 2009 at 08:50 AM
31 March 2009:
Category: Default
A 9 months old brown hyena cub was killed on the road near Haalenberg early in the morning on 31 March. It’s the second cub that was hit by a vehicle in this area.
Later that day I went on a field trip with children from the Luderitz Montessori school. I gave a talk about brown hyenas at their school the week before and the children could see for themselves what I was talking about during the field trip to Wolf Bay.
Posted by Ingrid on April 7, 2009 at 07:15 AM
18 to 19 March:
Category: Default
I went to the Van Reenen Bay seal colony to meet students from the Windhoek International School there. Their project was to patch up the research station and to paint and repair our project's observation hut.
Posted by Ingrid on March 21, 2009 at 07:10 AM
5 to 12 March 2009:
Category: Default
Gino came to Aus for one day and we flew to find Caspar and Oona. We found Oona south of the Koichab Pan resting in a riverbed near some rock pools that filled with water recently.
I also set up two camera traps at Wolf and Atlas Bay to establish a hyena ID catalogue for these areas, but both cameras failed. I hope to be able to buy replacement cameras soon, but haven’t heard from the supplier, Camtrakker yet.
Posted by Ingrid on March 15, 2009 at 08:19 AM
Tony:
Category: Default
About 1 ˝ years ago an old, female brown hyena got lost at one of Luderitz’ fish factories. We captured her, fitted her with a radio collar and released her north of Luderitz (see newsletter December 2007). Over the past few weeks, we got a few reports from Namdeb personnel that had seen her in the area between Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop, apparently in a bad condition. She was seen yesterday morning again and I went to investigate. She was in a very, very poor condition. Extremely thin and she had lots of bite wounds inflicted by other hyenas and was bleeding badly. She was completely disorientated and finally lay down in a resting site at about 10:00 h in the morning. I was sure that she would not survive that day and when I went back to search for her this morning, I found her dead at exactly the same spot where I had left her yesterday. At least she had a long life and died of natural causes, unlike many other of our study animals that get killed on the roads.
Posted by Ingrid on February 25, 2009 at 12:05 PM
Introduction to news page:
Category: Default
The news page is a new addition to our web page. It does not replace the newsletter though, as I only want to keep you up to date with the project's work on a more regular basis, so I keep it short and sweet.
The year did not start too well - we already have to record a roadkill of a radio collared female (1 February).
Gino and I went flying to download Caspar's, Rodin's and Oona's data (7 to 9 February). The flights were great, but two of the collars were not performing too well and we had to drop one of them off - more info in the next newsletter.
Posted by Ingrid on February 17, 2009 at 07:30 AM
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