Brown Hyena

Brown Hyena battle analysis

The brown hyena looks like a large, long-haired dog with a sloping back: dark brown to black, with a cream mantle around the neck and shoulders and a coat that bristles up to 30 cm when it is excited. A mature male weighs around 43 kg. It is the hyena of the Kalahari and the Namib, where rain can be less than 100 mm a year and food is thinly spread.

Its answer to scarcity is distance and a nose. Brown hyenas spend most of the night on the move, averaging about 31 km, and can find even dried carcasses by scent from 2 km away. On the Namib coast they patrol beaches for dead seal pups and washed-up marine life. They hunt only occasionally and rarely succeed, taking springhares, lambs and bat-eared foxes, so most of what they eat comes from carcasses and from kills they steal.

Stealing is where its fighting ability shows. A lone brown hyena will charge a leopard with its jaws open and can force an adult male up a tree, and it routinely displaces cheetahs and jackals. Its skull is among the largest in the hyena family and its bite-force quotient is close to the spotted hyena's. On the absolute roster scale it sits slightly above the striped hyena, just below the gray wolf in Attack and well below the spotted hyena, with very high Stamina from its long desert walks.

Habitat & range

Southern Africa's arid west: Namibia, Botswana, western and southern Zimbabwe, southern Mozambique and South Africa. It lives in desert with under 100 mm of rain, especially along the coast, and in semi-desert, open scrub and open woodland savanna up to about 650 mm of rain. It is independent of drinking water but needs cover to lie up in by day, and it can survive close to farms and towns.

Diet & hunting

A scavenger of a wide range of vertebrate remains, supplemented by wild fruits such as tsama melons, insects, birds' eggs and the occasional small animal it kills. In farming areas of South Africa it scavenges cattle carcasses and medium and small wild animals. It caches food and steals kills from jackals, cheetahs and leopards.

Social life

Lives in clans that share and defend a territory but usually forage alone. Clans have separate male and female dominance hierarchies. Many males are nomads that roam between clan territories, and both nomadic and immigrant males may mate with clan females.

Conservation

Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List, with a global population estimated at 4,000–10,000. Main threats are persecution by livestock farmers, poisoning, road deaths and disease from domestic dogs; 43% of Namib Desert brown hyenas sampled had antibodies to canine distemper virus. Density estimates in fenced South African reserves varied almost tenfold depending on whether fences were assumed to be permeable, showing how uncertain population numbers are.

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