Klaserie – the hyena post

Here are a few photos from our recent Klaserie trip.  We are not getting into the bush nearly enough as you can tell by how few updates there are to my site.  The river is still flowing and the bush is very green for this time of year.  

During our 2012 visit to Klaserie there were two leopards calling close to the house most evenings, but in the week and half that we were there we did not spot them even once.  Shortly after we got back from that visit I bought a camera trap to catch the leopards during our next trip.  We have used the camera trap in and around our home in Kansanshi to see which creatures visit at night, and to spy on the “help”; we caught hippos and eles on it in South Luangwa and leopards in Kafue.  A mate of ours has even used it to nab a thieving employee stealing money from his safe (Rory actually left the camera trap in the safe on video mode and caught his thief as he opened the safe using the ill gotten pass code).  So two years after buying my camera trap, we were finally back in Klaserie to catch the leopards, which we did.  After our Klaserie trip, John and I put it up at a hyena den in Jejane where there was a lot of activity.  The following morning we set out excitedly to retrieve the camera trap, but it was gone.  Assuming that one of he rangers had removed it, we contacted the head ranger for what we expected to be a scalding, and the return of my camera trap.  But he had a good laugh and told us that it was almost certainly eaten by the hyenas, a fate that often befalls his camera traps.  The worst part is that I had not downloaded any of the photos on the card, damn hyenas.

Back at Klaserie, the hyenas had made a den out of the culvert that runs underneath the air strip.  The three pups are already fairly big and were very inquisitive.  One evening they walked around the Landy getting within a meter or so of us. Here’s a collection of some images I got of them.