A hyena with a snare around it's neck had been spotted on Thornybush. The vets needed eyes on the ground, funding for the callout, and a window after dark to try and bring it in. Wild Wonderful World said yes, and two guests from Monwana Game Lodge, eager to see what conservation actually looks like off the brochure, joined WWW Conservation Director Evelyn in the field.
She tells us what happened:
We met the Thornybush management team (headed up by warden Hannes Zowitsky), the anti-poaching unit and the veterinary team (led by Dr. Joel Alves) at Thornybush headquarters before heading out to the chosen site. The plan was a call up: a bait (usually a young male impala) hung from a tree with a chain, and a speaker playing the distress calls of a dying antelope or warthog to pull hyena in from the surrounding bush. If the snared animal was among them, the vets would dart it there and then.
Meanwhile, some of the APU headed out to scout the surrounding area for any lions potentially attracted to the call up too. If they decided to show up, we wouldn't be able to safely dart the hyena and remove the snare.
Monwana kept us fed with refreshments and snacks while we waited. Laurent from the anti-poaching unit lent us their thermal binoculars, and within minutes of switching them on, a hyena was already at the base of the tree, checking out the bait.
It wasn't the one we needed.
We kept the calls playing, which to be completely honest, is a rather uncomfortable sound! More hyena arrived, until at one point we counted seven or eight around the tree, lit up and clearly visible through the thermal scope. Two of them carried the scars of old snare wounds, animals that had been caught and freed before. One of them was the female who had to stay in the horse stables for recovery after snare removal. A small reminder that this kind of intervention works when the timing lines up. Tonight it didn't. No sign of the hyena we'd come for.
With five or six hyena still circling the base of the tree, a female leopard suddenly came running in! She went straight up the trunk, bumping the speaker out the tree on her way up and tried to hoist the impala higher, but the chain held it in place. She dropped back down and slunk across the road in front of us into the bushes. Thornybush's team read the situation immediately: she had a cub, likely stashed nearby so she'd be back for that carcass whether the chain liked it or not.
The speaker that got knocked to the ground was not a cheap piece of kit. Leaving it on the ground with hyena still around was asking for it to become a chew toy. With the leopard likely to return, Joel decided to call off the operation and remove the equipment. We wouldn't be able to safely relocate a hyena if it ran too far away after being darted. Joel had the vehicle reverse up to the tree, hyena still moving around the base, climbed down to retrieve the speaker, and while he was there he removed the chain and left the bait loose in the branches.
As predicted, the leopard returned and this time she hauled the impala up onto a higher branch. Cue an amazing, Nat Geo worthy sighting, with the hyena jumping around the base of the tree trying to get the leopard to drop the impala. She nearly lost it too, at one point hanging almost vertical by her back legs after nearly losing her grip on it, before hoisting it back up. About 15 minutes later, the hyena seemed to decide the kill was out of reach for good and started drifting off.
We decided to do the same.
We left the leopard to enjoy her free "Uber eats" and started back to the lodge. On the way, we bumped into the hyenas having a little scuffle with a pride of lions, drawn in by all the noise the night had made.
The hyena with the snare never showed. While we can count on one hand the amount of times a desnaring operation got derailed by leopard, an unsuccessful call up is something we see regularly: a report comes in, but by the time a vet team can get out after dark, the animal has moved on or simply isn't in range that particular night. And this happened to be one of those. We're not giving up: Thornybush and the anti-poaching unit are keeping an eye out, and if it's seen again, we'll be back to try another call up.
What our guests got instead was two hours of watching what it takes to protect wild spaces and a live food chain play out in real time: hyena, leopard, a stolen bait, and a pride of lions closing out the night. It's not the ending anyone was hoping for, but it's an honest look at what this work actually involves: patience, expensive equipment nearly lost, and a result that isn't guaranteed even when everyone does everything right.
And yes, this operation still has to be funded. Which, thanks to Monwana, we were able to do!
Thanks to Thornybush for allowing us this insight into the inner workings of reserve management, the Wildscapes team for always being available and enabling partnerships, and to Monwana for building these conservation contributions into their guest experiences.
Written by Evelyn Poole.
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