Wild Dog’s Breakfast

On our recent trip to the Khwai Community campsites, just outside of the Moremi Game Reserve, we showed up, uninvited, to…a wild dog’s breakfast.

Escaping the office and Maun for the long four-day President’s weekend we head north about two hours from home into the bush. On our first morning we stay in the tent a bit later than one should, if you want to be out looking for cats, but the night was windy and the grass munching hippos were loud and I found myself up a good part of the night. This is not an uncommon pattern; Paul sleeps like the dead when we’re in the bush and I stay up at night… listening. There are lots of sounds to hear. On this particular night it was the wind (I feared our tent might collapse on us) and grazing hippos (which sounded like they were right outside our tent chewing away). On our second morning we woke to find spoor (foot prints) of both a hyena and a honey badger just inches from the corner or our tent - -where our heads were! Fortunately, I was so tired from not sleeping the first night that I slept right through it…

In any case, on this particular morning we stay in the tent a little longer, not only because I haven’t slept much but also because a cold front has come in with the strong winds from the south and it is ice cold. I mean ski hat and gloves, sleep in your thermal underwear cold! Still in our evening “warms” (what your warm clothes are called here…FYI pants are called “longs”), we begin driving around the sand tracks to see what we can see. This particular area has tons of elephants, hippos and impala but as we round one corner I see three wild dogs on an impala kill. This is very exciting as wild dogs are quite elusive -- I’ve probably had less than half a dozen sightings in the five years I’ve been here.

When the Furman group was here in May we saw a pack of four very close to where we were on this past trip. Even from our viewing point in May, across the Khwai River,  we could see that one had a recently broken leg (the lower part of the left front leg was simply dangling and the poor dog couldn’t put any weight on it at all and had to hobble on the remaining three). Interestingly, the other three dogs seemed to be caring/watching out for the injured dog; nudging her to get up when they were leaving, sticking close to her when she was lying down.

As we watch this pack of three on the impala kill I notice that one of them is limping a little and seems to have an injury to the left front leg. We’re convinced it must be the same injured dog we saw two months earlier. While she can now put weight on the leg and seems to getting along quite well, when given the opportunity she lies down to get off of it.

They take turns eating, pulling and tugging at what is left of the impala carcass (the innards sit in a bloody ball about four yards away from the rest of the body). We are so early on the kill that vultures begin to arrive as we watch (typically when you come onto a kill you know where it is by the abundance of vultures in the trees overhead). There is a pecking order to eating at a kill and the vultures are the last in line. As scavengers they have to wait for the hunters to finish first.

 

Apparently exactly “when” they are allowed to eat is not clear, as over the course of the morning they inch closer and closer to the kill only to be chased off by one of the wild dogs when they’ve passed some invisible line. The dogs themselves seem to have set up a system wherein one will eat while another chases off vultures. 

Interestingly the chasing looks more playful than aggressive. It’s as if it is a game. He elongates his body into a perfectly straightly line parallel to the ground – nose pointing out forward, large rounded ears down flat, white fluffy tale out straight… and then he springs into action, running into the flock of vultures sending them flapping into the air with their long wings crashing into each other as they try to take flight. From the safety of their perch they wait for another opportunity to stealthily land on the ground and inch closer to the kill, hoping for a bite. 

 

 

At one point, a group of vultures gets brave enough to go for the innards. The literally pick up the ball of yuck and transport it to the other side of a log. While the guarding dog takes a run at them, followed by a leap into the air, he doesn’t pursue them too far as he’s not interested in this part of the kill. Instantly a mass of vultures descend. All we see is a flurry of wings and dust and pulling and what’s been discarded by the dogs is gone in seconds!

Pregnant dog with wounded leg

We watch for an hour or more as the dogs take turns eating. They rip what’s left of the carcass in two and continue to eat. They intermittently rest, eat, chase vultures. Their stomachs are bloated with meat, we notice however, that the wounded dog’s stomach is more bloated and in fact conclude that she must be pregnant. This is a little late in the season for pregnancy and she looks like she could be due any day.

As more safari vehicles begin to descend on the kill (like vultures…by the end there are six vehicles total) the wild dogs decide they’ve had their fill and head off down the road. In moments, what is left of the carcass is covered in vultures. I now understand why their necks are so long. Their wings look like hiked up shoulder blades banging and crashing into their neighbors’ as a mass of vultures try to stretch their necks into the cluster to get a little bite! From our perspective it is all dust and wings and elbowing for position.

When we pass by the area later in the day, all that is left is the impala’s head and neck. That certainly was a “dog’s breakfast”.*

 

We spend three nights in Khwai before heading to a friend of Paul’s wild dog research camp. We are excited to share our story with the researchers and they are anxious to see if they can identify the dogs. While, to us, they simply look like beautiful mixes of black, tan, and white (sometimes called “African painted wolves”), to the researchers, they have a whole system of dog identification from our pictures. From what I can gather they look for distinguishing white marks. Our wounded dog is identified as “Ellen” (I’m not sure this is better than what I’ve been calling her, which is “Miss Booboo Leg”, but it seems there were a rash of talk show host names used to identify dogs for a period of time).

She is known by a distinguishing white check mark on her side. She’s actually been sited (in the past) all the way in Zimbabwe and the two males she is currently with are not dogs that the researchers know (suggesting she’s picked them up somewhere along her way). They agree that she is pregnant and will probably “den down” in about a week (in preparation for the arrival of her litter – typically 8-10 pups). They’ve seen her recently with another pregnant female who they suspect has already gone underground (so to speak). The typical gestation period is 60-73 days so she was fairly recently impregnated back in May when we saw her with her freshly wounded leg. We learn that she is an older female who has had previous litters. The researchers explain that it is not uncommon to see packs of dogs collaborate to care for a wounded dog... a happy ending to what we feared might be a life ending injury in May.

*Note: In Southern Africa there is a phrase used to describe things as a “dog’s breakfast”. While I’m not completely sure of its meaning, the context it is used in seems to describe a situation that is a complete mess. This certainly was the case for the impala on this morning.