Cat among the pigeons

by David Muirhead

  A diet of bones gets a little monotonous, of course, and on occasion lammergeiers do take live prey, notably dassies and young buck, though not in the manner of an eagle. Their typical method is to surprise a luckless victim in a precarious spot and bully it over the edge of a precipice, relying on gravity to do most of the dirty work. With impressive talons and a wingspan not far short of 3 metres, a lammergeier is certainly capable of lifting small mammals, almost up to its own bodyweight of around 5 kilograms. In some cultures, the illusion of immense power gave rise to the belief that they grabbed small children and spirited them away to feed to their own chicks. In reality, accidents and sinister human interventions were the likely causes of such sad disappearances from alpine meadows.

  Bearded vultures live almost exclusively in mountainous terrain, choosing inaccessible cliff ledges and crevices to build their nests. Their young are born into a vertiginous world, greeted by a vista of soaring peaks and dizzy chasms. South Africa has a small lammergeier population, resident in the Drakensberg and Maluti mountains; to the north they occur in the mountainous areas of East Africa and Ethiopia; then on to Europe and the Pyrenees and the Alps, and finally east to the Himalayas. Theirs is an inhospitable world for humankind and one that many cultures have ceded, somewhat parsimoniously, to their gods.

  Taking advantage of the privacy such isolation affords, and in keeping with the drama of the landscape, bearded vultures indulge in exceptionally flamboyant mating rituals. Following a series of preliminary aerial manoeuvres, a pair will lock talons and free fall for hundreds of metres, a process they can exuberantly repeat a dozen times and more before alighting on the nest for a head-bobbing and foot-stamping session. The odd thing is that they are sometimes not entirely alone. Peeping Toms with powerful binoculars have observed that there are occasionally three birds present: two males and a femme fatale, presumably hedging her bets. Aside from such quaint deviations, the birds are thought to be monogamous.

  Lammergeiers like to live on a large estate and nests are consequently widely spaced, with the nearest neighbour being many kilometres away. They construct several nests within their home range and use a different one each year, almost certainly to stay a step ahead of the parasites that turn up uninvited, even at such exclusive and lofty addresses. A nest is built with sticks and lined with wool and other bits and pieces. Seabirds, among others, often choose cliff ledges so narrow and scary that their offspring need therapy before they can summon the will to fly. In contrast, lammergeiers place a premium on roominess and stability, choosing a leeward slope and a recess sufficiently protected from inclement weather. The chick, when it hatches, can survey the astonishing scene, which might even include Mount Everest, with equanimity.

  A young bearded vulture is not born with the skills to drop bones and tortoises from the sky but rather learns from observing its parents. What is included in its birthright is the freedom to roam its own empire in the sky. One can only hope this will never be denied, in any viable future, by the insatiable needs of humankind.

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  PANGOLIN

  It is difficult to understand what Nature was trying to achieve with the pangolin. A possible explanation is that she took a rare day off about 50 million years ago, around about the time she was working on the Carnivora – cats, dogs, bears and those sorts of animals. Maybe she left a junior assistant in charge of that part of the gene pool and he got the schematics the wrong way round.

  Whatever the reason, the end result was a mammal covered in scales, with no teeth and a tongue that is rooted somewhere near its pelvis. The whole assembly was basically designed to eat ants and to curl up when threatened, looking like a hybrid between a football and giant artichoke. The really odd thing is that the design worked well, so much so that there are still seven different species of pangolin shuffling about or swinging in the trees today. If the assistant got a clip on the ear when Nature returned, that ultimately proved unfair.

  Of the seven extant species, four live in Africa and three in Asia. Two of the African species are mainly arboreal, have long prehensile tails and weigh less than 2.5 kilograms; they live in the equatorial forests of west and central Africa. This is also the main stomping ground of the giant pangolins, though their range also extends into parts of East Africa. The giants, as you’d expect, are 10 to 12 times heavier and firmly terrestrial. The Cape pangolin falls somewhere in the middle in terms of weight and size, and is the only species that occurs is southern Africa, though not, despite the name, as far south as the Cape. They are, after all, creatures of the tropics.

  To a greater or lesser degree, all pangolins are faced with the imminent prospect of extinction. They are mercilessly hunted for their meat, particularly in Asia. The quantities of pangolin meat seized from poachers can be staggering: a single illegal cache sometimes represents the mortal remains of several thousand individual animals. As the numbers have plummeted in the wild, the price per kilo has soared, thereby further energising poachers.

  Pangolins are easy to catch because they can’t bite and don’t run very fast; instead they conveniently roll up into a ball when alarmed, so any fool and his friend can pick one up and pop it into a sack. Adding to the problem, pangolin scales feature prominently in the Asian and African pharmacopoeias of the absurd; dried, roasted and ground to a powder, they provide an imaginary cure for a wide variety of real ailments. An insatiable demand for their meat and scales has resulted in pangolins currently having the unwelcome distinction of being the most trafficked animal on the planet, a tragedy amplified by the fact that many folk aren’t even aware that they exist.

  In the normal course of events a pangolin’s method of defence works well. Like a rhino’s horn, the scales are made of keratin, a modified type of hair so hard that even the claws and teeth of leopards and lions are unable to penetrate. The big cats tend to roll pangolins around for a while and then lose interest, though they might not escape the encounter totally unscathed themselves. If a curled-up pangolin chooses to slide its tail to and fro while being sniffed, prodded and poked, a lion soon discovers that the edges of its scales are sharp enough to inflict nasty cuts.

  When attending to its own business, a Cape pangolin plods through the bush on its stubby hind legs, nose to the ground, employing its tail and short forelegs now and again to help prevent itself from falling over. It’s a design so odd and seemingly awkward that one is inclined to wonder why Nature, after giving her assistant a good wallop, didn’t simply screw up the sketch and start again. Any colony of ants would undoubtedly concur.

  A pangolin’s eyesight is poor and it locates an ant or termite nest mainly by smell. The strong claws on its forefeet then come into play, digging to reveal the network of little tunnels. It feeds rather like a child dipping a liquorice stick into a packet of sherbet, though with less mess and far greater efficiency. Its thin tongue is covered in sticky mucus and is long enough to be inserted deep into an ant tunnel; once tucked in, it is briefly wiggled about before being rapidly withdrawn, usually with dozens of ants stuck to it.

  The tongue heads straight through the toothless mouth and offloads the ants or termites straight into the pangolin’s muscular stomach. In essence it chews with its stomach, the muscular contractions aided in their task by the grinding together of small pebbles. These are occasionally ingested for precisely that purpose, along with the grit that adheres to its tongue while feeding. It sounds like a perfect recipe for constant indigestion but pangolins don’t seem worried by it.

  With a veritable cosmos of ants and termites to choose from, pangolins are relatively fussy about which ones they choose to eat. And not all ants are simply food: like some species of bird, pangolins encourage certain types of ant to clamber all over them, even raising their scales to give the little critters better access. The formic acid exuded by the furious insects kills the parasites and mites that could otherwise make life miserable.

  Life in general is, alas, rapidly becoming miserable for these inoffensive little
oddities. All those millions of years ago, it would have been impossible to foresee that the chink in their armour would prove to be Nature’s flagship project: a modified ape with a turbo-charged brain and yet insufficient common sense.

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  NIGHTJAR

  In medieval Europe, nightjars were known by a variety of peculiar names, but the most ludicrous was ‘goatsucker’, derived from their supposed habit of stealing milk from the teats of goats. Drawing even deeper from the murky well of superstition, rural folk called them ‘corpse birds’. Some still harbour the belief that they peck livestock for no apparent reason, drawing blood and thereby causing a type of distemper. When they’re not doing that, they’re the spooky spirits of children who died before they could be baptised.

  To get a break from such codswallop, it’s little wonder that European nightjars pack their bags, put on their Ray-Bans, and head south for the winter, mainly to southern Africa. On arrival they presumably renew their acquaintance with their permanently resident cousins, notably including the fiery-necked nightjar, renowned for its melodious voice. One of its calls is routinely likened to ‘good Lord, deliver us’, perhaps a disbelieving reaction to hearing about the fanciful nonsense their European counterparts have had to put up with during their long sojourn overseas.

  There are about 80 species of nightjar spread around the world and 19 species of nighthawk, close cousins resident in the Americas. All of them are crepuscular and spend the day being as inconspicuous as possible. Dove-sized and kitted out in freckled whites and motley shades of brown and grey to match grasses, leaf litter or tree bark, they’re all but invisible when they’re perched on a branch or nesting on the woodland floor. With their large eyes reduced to slits in the bright daylight, they have a vaguely reptilian appearance, enhanced by the fact that they’re inclined to squat lengthwise on a branch, rather than adopt the traditional pert avian pose.

  When inadvertently approached on its perch during the day, a nightjar remains motionless until the very last moment, relying on its camouflage to keep it from being discovered. This usually works well, so much so that more than one gardener, not expecting a large knob on a branch suddenly to spring to life and gape at him, has come close to having a heart attack.

  Nightjars are widespread, though very patchy, in their distribution throughout southern Africa, with considerable overlaps between some species. They mostly favour woodlands and savannas where shade and cover are available, but some are able and willing to brave more extreme conditions. This is largely thanks to their ability to cope with wide temperature variations. On a cold winter’s night in Namaqualand, a roosting freckled nightjar was recorded as having lowered its body temperature to a chilly 10 degrees centigrade without ill effects. At the other extreme, nightjars have been observed incubating their eggs on hot sands in the blazing sun at the fringes of the Kalahari for the entire day without being cooked to a crisp. Their disproportionately enormous gape allows water to constantly evaporate from their throat without the need for panting.

  Among further distinctions, nightjars are famous for being one of the very few birds to have a fine set of whiskers. These protrude below the eyes, down and forwards at the sides of the beak. More accurately, they’re modified feathers rather than hair, and their purpose is not sartorial, but rather to help precisely locate insects in flight and guide them into the bird’s gaping mouth. They also help protect the eyes from being damaged by the flapping wings of moths, beetles and other nocturnal airborne prey.

  As expected, a nightjar’s night vision is exceptional, though it’s not in the same league as an owl’s. They consequently hunt in the deep twilight, morning and evening, rather than in the dead of night, extending their nocturnal activities when the sky is clear and the moon close to full. Where available they take advantage of pools of artificial light, hunting insects on the periphery as they’re drawn in. On occasion they’ll follow an animal or a person walking through their range in the late evening, snapping up insects disturbed in their wake. This opportunistic trait can be eerily disconcerting for a nervous country traveller eager to escape the creeping night, and get to the sanctuary of accommodation.

  Nightjars are monogamous, with the male evincing a strong devotion to his chosen mate, and his mate demonstrating an equally strong devotion to the prime piece of real estate that comes with the union. The birds are adamantly territorial and, during the mating season, some of the bewildering array of woops, chop-chops, chuckoos, twitters and tweets the different species make are assumed to be a way of warning others not to intrude on their patch.

  A mating pair times egg laying for the week following the advent of a full moon, though not, disappointingly, for romantic reasons. The eggs are incubated for about three weeks and this foresight ensures that light conditions are optimal, weather permitting, for the birds to hunt insects when the chicks finally hatch.

  All nightjars nest on the ground and the chicks are wholly dependent on dumb luck and their camouflage for survival. If a predator approaches the nest, an adult bird may try and lead it away by feigning injury, lamely suggesting itself as an alternative and more substantial lunch. They don’t always do that and it doesn’t always work anyway, so a high proportion of eggs and chicks fall victim to snakes, jackals, civets and all the other usual suspects. The birds sometimes compensate for the shortfall by raising two broods in a season.

  Despite the inadequacies of their breeding strategy, nightjars have managed to find a unique niche for themselves in a twilight world in which avian competition is drastically reduced and insects are seldom in short supply. In this dimly lit borderland between night and day, natural perils are still numerous, but the birds at least don’t have to contend with the grotesque nocturnal creations of the human imagination.

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  BROWN HYENA

  It’s not easy having a celebrity big brother, least of all one who’s on intimate snarling terms with lions and leopards and pumped up to the eyeballs with testosterone. It hurts when he bosses you about at mealtimes, cackling with laughter at your long shaggy hair, and points with derision at your smart striped socks. With a big brother like that the best plan is to avoid him like the plague and make a new life somewhere else.

  Continually harassed and bullied by the super-macho spotted hyena, the brown hyena decided eaons ago to do precisely this. It wandered into the desolate wastes of the Kalahari and down to the Skeleton Coast, any place where the pickings were too lean to appeal to its overbearing relative.

  Perusing the brochures prior to departure, ‘Skeleton Coast’ must have sounded quite promising to a hyena but, as is so often the case, the advertising proved to be misleading. In the vast sandy spaces skeletons are in fact few and far between and it’s usually necessary to plod many kilometres before finding a decent meal. The trip to the coast would have proved a big disappointment if it weren’t for the dead seals that routinely wash up from colonies on the offshore islands, and other occasional gifts from the sea.

  Finding a place with adequate leftovers is essential because there’s simply no escaping the fact that the brown hyena is a lousy hunter. At a little over just half the weight of a spotted hyena, it hasn’t got the brawn to tackle the kind of prey its larger relative brings down. It is also a loner, seldom, if ever, joining a gang, and thus unable to rely on the numbers necessary to corner little old ladies, let alone wildebeest. Only 5 to 6 per cent of the meals a brown hyena eats consists of live prey, and even then the largest item is seldom bigger than a springhare or a guinea fowl. It’s not that it doesn’t try; it simply lacks the speed and agility to catch animals that are equipped to escape more proficient killers.

  Being a bit clumsy and slow off the mark isn’t the end of the world. The brown hyena lives by the mantra that everything that lives must one day die, and it makes a big effort to ensure that it’s in a position to pay its proper respects whenever that day comes. These hyenas routinely cover huge distances each night, nose constantly sniffing the air
, and can detect the molecules dispersing from a rotting corpse from several kilometres away. If a brown hyena arrives late and all the other mourners have reduced the carcass to a pile of bones, it’s still able to make an adequate meal of what’s left because its jaws and teeth are almost as powerful as those of its much larger spotted relative.

  As bleak as the menu may sound, the brown hyena doesn’t always have to make do with bin scrapings or grisly food parcels floating in from the sea. It may lack hunting skills but it’s not lacking in courage and chutzpah. Frizzing itself up to look bigger, the plucky beast is sometimes prepared to throw caution to the wind and charge in on a cheetah, or even a leopard, to steal its kill. It takes a lot of guts to do that when you’re by yourself and you’re not renowned for your skills in the martial arts. If the hyena chooses the wrong leopard, it can sometimes prove fatal.

  Despite the fact that spotted hyenas and lions have long since been locked up in game reserves, brown hyenas still choose to live mainly in the relatively arid and desolate regions of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. Nevertheless, they are great travellers and, perhaps sensing that their ancient nemeses are now both doing time, a few are popping up in areas they might once instinctively have avoided, including what are now the rocky suburbs of Johannesburg and the peripheries of other towns. Those that do make the trip find themselves having to contend with other problems, including the traffic.

  Although the majority live in den-based family groups, a high proportion of adult male brown hyenas are nomadic, holding no allegiance to a family or clan, but rather wandering wherever the mood or a promising breeze might take them. That promise might be the hint of a female on heat or the makings of a meal. Even hyenas that are part of a family group forage alone at night after they’ve left the den, undertaking expeditions that can last three or four days. Unlike spotted hyenas, all members of a family, including the dominant male, usually take food back to their cousins, nephews and nieces at the den. The one notable exception is the father of the cubs who is invariably long gone: in the interests of keeping the gene pool well stirred, a local female usually mates with a passing nomad rather than the dominant resident male. This worthy not only accepts the arrangement but also helps to raise all her pups as though they were his own.