The past, the poop and palynology

Do you ever imagine how your neighbourhood looked before humans rocked up?
How about back when giant ground sloths pottered in your garden, or a Tyrannosaurus bedded down where your house now stands?

It’s only a blink ago, in geological time.

Of course we tend to forget that hopping and squeaking, right outside our doors, are the direct descendents of those monstrous beasts.

Photo posted on Flickr by kibuyu.



 OK, I know sparrows are a bit of a comedown, but if you're ever up close and personal with an ostrich’s foot, you’ll never again doubt the dinosaurishness of birds.



Living outside my own backdoor (well actually it’s about 0.5 km away) is a seriously anachronistic beast. Small and inconspicuous with a curmudgeonly air, it cunningly hides its connections to an illustrious past.

  

You see if you pop back 40 million years here, you won’t meet many of Africa’s iconic beasts. There’ll be no antelopes or zebras, buffalos or giraffes; even the hogs hadn’t tromped in yet. (Of course, there were mongooses; but who could imagine a world without them?).

Back in those days, Africa’s principal veggie-eaters came from an entirely different family; creatures whose great grand-pappy also sired the mastodons and mammoths. These herbivores stomped and frolicked in a carnival of diversity, ranging from diminutive mouse-like critters to rhino-sized brutes; some slick and fleet of foot, others dumpy and lumbering.

So who were these creatures?

Hyraxes.

Yep, that’s right, good ol’ dassies.

Ellies' rellies? Rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) might look marmot-like but they've more in common with their elephant kin. Both are scrotum-free (their testes are internal), lack a gall bladder, sport impressive tusks, have hoof-like toenails and endure pregnancies that last forever (7-8 months in hyraxes).
Photo posted on Flickr by Koets.

Small human shown for scale.
Photo (taken on the Cape Peninsula) by Danie van der Merwe.

Sadly, the arrival of ruminants put paid to the Golden Age of Hyraxes. Out-competed by these consummate vegans (who would have thought that chewing your food twice could prove so beneficial), hyraxes withdrew to the nooks and crannies of the continent. Today only four species remain.

Possibly because of this fall from grace, rock hyraxes are obstreperous little beasts. Although they live in colonies of up to 35 animals (one macho male with a harem of sisters, daughters and aunts), social relations are strained. Look closely at a mob of hyraxes basking atop a rocky outcrop and you’ll notice that they never sit facing one another; they fan out like iron-filings around a magnet.
When they bounce down off the rocks to graze as a herd (harvesting a different section of their range each day) they also arrange themselves like this. And when a hyrax wants to join a huddle or enter a crevice, it reverses in backwards.

Weapons of dassie destruction.
Fights (mostly between males) can be fatal
due to the hyrax's tusks.
Photo by Brian Burger.

Why?

Well in hyrax-speak, eye-to-eye contact is equivalent to a rude hand gesture and, let me tell you, a pissed-off hyrax is scary. It growls, it gnashes its molars, it erects the black fur around its dorsal gland (a smelly, goo-secreting patch in the middle of its back), it curls its lip and slashes with its gruesome tusks.

Oh yes, despite their heart-warming shape, hyraxes are not heart-warming beasts. Unlike my charming mongooses, they will not suckle one another's pups; heck, they won't even groom each other!

And in the breeding season everything gets much worse due to a massive influx of testosterone: the dominant male's testes increase 20-fold in size! 

   

For the biblical ‘coney’, soaking up the sun isn’t just a leisure activity. Being of ancient origin, the hyrax’s thermostat is faulty so it basks and huddles to stay warm (even ‘stacking’ on chilly nights) and hides in shady crevices when it's hot.
Photo by Steve Krane.



Quite a mouthful. With their top incisors transformed into tusks and their lower ones converted into a grooming comb, rock hyraxes must nip off their veggies with their molars. Their huge gape lets them take bites as large as a sheep’s (as my deformed thumb will testify).

Photo by Damien du Toit.

 



Baby hyraxes are born in summer (all the girls in a colony give birth syncronously). They immediately clamber up on to Mum's dorsal gland: their favourite hang-out spot for the next five months.
 Photo by Paul Genge





A teat of one's one. Infant hyraxes divy up Mum's nipples, remaining faithful to their chosen teat/s for the entire 3-5 month suckling period.



Thanks to the tenacity of this weird little animal (it's only got three hind toes: i.e. proof of weirdness) we can begin to imagine the bygone fauna of Africa. But it’s actually one of the rock hyraxes more mundane habits that’s proven most helpful to our understanding of the past.


Like all sensible creatures, rock hyraxes deposit their poop in latrines. Their toilet facilities are conveniently located close to the colony’s sleeping quarters (usually beneath a rock overhang) and are used, unswervingly, for centuries. The hyraxes not only poop here, they merrily splash pee over the rocks, and when the calcium carbonate in the urine crystallises, it not only creates tell-tale white stains, it cements the droppings in place. Protected from the weather, these piles of poop provide an amazing, stratified compilation of the past.


A pile of poop or an
invaluable historical record?



Now I didn’t realise this until I researched this post, but hyrax middens are the bee’s knees for palynologists (pollen enthusiasts). You see air-borne pollen grains stick enthusiastically to fresh hyrax poop, so by sifting through the layers of stratified shit and identifying the attendant pollen, these diligent souls can ascertain past climates. Thanks to radio-carbon dating we know that a hyrax midden from the Karoo provided 1130 years of compiled hyrax history, and a Namibian midden yielded 2000 years worth of ongoing shit data! But it doesn’t stop there. In dry climates, hyrax dung readily fossilises, and fossil middens have shed light on 20,000 years of southern Africa’s past.

Go hyraxes!

 

 

Reparation. "This picnic is mine!"
Photo by Tim Parkinson.

 

The mysterious case of the missing mammals

It’s grim struggling out of bed on cold winter mornings but there are compensations.

For me, it’s watching the sunbathers.
Voyeurism, I know, but who can resist all those exposed fluffy tummies.

In the big nyala tree behind my house the vervet monkeys bob about like sailors in the rigging, waiting in the topmost foliage for the sun’s first rays. And when the light catches their coats, they blaze silver. Nearer at hand, dozens of tiny fire finches, blue waxbills and cut-throat finches squabble in the buffalo-thorn outside my bedroom. Lined up in the warming sun, they ruffle their feathers and shuffle their feet and complain non-stop in a cacophony of twittering.

But my favourite sun-worshippers sit about on the koppies (granite outcrops) I pass on route to my study site. Silhouetted against the sky on the giant ears of rock, they look like an infestation of ticks (OK, I’ve been working on small mammals for too long). But up close, they transform into pyjama-filled plush toys.



Rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) are less adept than most of us at keeping their body temperature just so which makes their early morning sun-bathing session mandatory.

Now I’ve been spying on this unsuspecting colony of rock hyraxes (or dassies) every day for almost six years, so you can imagine my consternation a month or so ago when they all disappeared.

Was I passing by too early? Too late?
I often see eagles hovering about the rocks - clearly with evil intent - but they couldn’t have scoffed everyone. I rushed home to scour the hyrax literature to find what might have happened.
Apparently diseases like mange can wipe out whole colonies (yet no one’s looked moth-eaten) and a colony can include several widely-spaced koppies in their territory, so maybe they'd just changed residences (but they've never left before).

It was at this time too, that I noticed a new set of tracks on the road at the base of the koppies. Amid the usual mosaic of paw prints (laid down by genets and jackals, civets and porcupines) were prints I’d never seen before: the rear paw’s imprint always overlapped that of the fore paw.

Of course I didn’t put two and two together at first.
But then Koppiekats disappeared.

Koppiekats is the mongoose group who hangs out at the base of the koppies (hence their name). For days I scoured their territory (about 40 ha/100 acres of bush), searching every tussock, termite mound and cranny until I was quite certain they simply weren’t in it. But where were they?? A skiing holiday? A winter break in the Riviera? Victims of alien abduction?

Now when a mongoose is snatched by a ground predator, its group will desert that part of its range, sometimes for up to six months. But what could induce Koppiekats to vacate their entire territory? Dwarf mongooses are fiercely territorial critters and trespassing brings swift retribution. As I trudged about disconsolately seeking non-existent mongooses I kept stumbling upon macabre hints: the beak and piebald feathers of a late hornbill, random duiker legs, the half-consumed torso of a puff adder and a veritable fountain of francolin plumes. Hmm... Should I be checking over my shoulder?

Constant vigilance! Twenty-four species of raptor try to dine on my dwarf mongooses (Helogale parvula) and, on an average morning, the group suffers a predator scare once every 11 minutes. Unsurprisingly their repertoire of alarm squeaks is sophisticated. Their cries warn whether the peril is lurking in the grass or circling above and the degree of danger (from, ‘I spot trouble, but everything’s cool’ to ‘OH SH#@*T!!’).

It was at this point that I realised I’d better figure out who was making those weird paw prints. Now, for those without a foot fetish, deciphering the subtle disparities between the mitts of carnivores is wearying. I’ve spent many an hour crawling about in the dirt, clutching a grubby field guide and squinting in puzzlement at fuzzy-edged smudges. But these tracks turned out to be easy; there aren’t many carnivores with such distinctive pacing.
They were made by a caracal.

The caracal (Caracal caracal) may look like the lynx’s long-lost twin – complete with stumpy tail, untrimmed ear tufts and ginormous hind legs – but they’re not closely related. Molecular studies reveal that the caracal’s nearest and dearest is the African golden cat.
Photo posted on Flickr by e3000.

Now things made sense. These big-pawed, russet cats occasionally padded through our study site in the Kalahari Desert and when the meerkats got wind of one, they’d retreat down their burrow and refuse to emerge for 36 hours.
Why? Well caracals are weapons-grade predators. About the size of a small border collie, they’re dangerously opportunistic, slaying anything that's plentiful, from teeny bugs to antelope twice their own weight.
And they do it by ambush; lurking in wait to fell their victim with a single pounce.
And what a pounce!
A pet caracal, startled while sleeping, shot into the air, and measurements taken by the owner revealed that its forepaws only hit the wall at a height of 3.9 m (12ft 10”).

Such acrobatic feats have not gone unnoticed, and for millennia dignitaries in India and Persia (now Iran) kept tame caracals for hunting. In fact, caracals have given us that ever-handy expression, ‘put a cat among the pigeons’. The ancients - combining two favourite pastimes (bloodletting and gambling) - came up with a sport in which two caracals were set upon a flock of feeding pigeons, and wagers were laid on which of the cats would bring down the most birds. Hunting caracals can leap 4-5 metres (13-16 ft) into the air, and a skilled cat was able to snag up to ten birds before the flock escaped.

Dreaming of yummy mongooses? Back in the good ol’ days, caracals terrorised furred beasts throughout the deserts and dry savannahs of Africa, the Middle East and the Near East (as far as India and Russia). They’re now close to extinction in the northern hemisphere, and here in South Africa they’re classified as ‘vermin’ or ‘problem animals’ (depending on the PC-ness of the province) due to their taste for mutton, and are rigorously poisoned, trapped and shot.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson.

 
After a few weeks, the caracal prints stopped appearing on the track below the koppies (caracals have big territories) and, much to my relief, both the hyraxes and mongooses have now returned home. Unfortunately, two members of Koppiekats (Saturn and Shade) are missing, presumed consumed, and everyone else is pocked with bite-marks suggesting that their sojourn with the neighbours was not harmonious.
While I’m pleased that caracals live here (and I’d dearly love to see one), I do hope they don’t pay another visit soon.

Saturn (KM068). R.I.P.

Crying out loud

Have you ever lain awake in the night listening to the terrible shrieks, yowls and screams of something unknown?

Inevitably it happens when you're out camping, and all that separates you and the night is a thin smear of nylon.

Of course you know it's only some animal. Right?

I mean, there's no way it's a banshee, a victim of torture or that second-grade teacher you knew was a witch.
And while you're rationally thinking this, your body is preparing for the worst. Your palms grow sweaty, your breathing quickens and you leap neurotically at the smallest noise. Meanwhile your mind, consciously refusing houseroom to thoughts of ghouls, ghosts and gremlins, merrily conjures images of maimed animals; innocent creatures twisting in the agony of trap or snare, desperately gnawing at their own mangled legs.

What's prompted me to reminisce about such fun experiences?
Well I recently came across an entertaining article ('5 lovable animals you didn't know are secretly terrifying') and one of the critters it lists is the red fox. In an amusing transcript, the article describes - with quite uncanny accuracy - my own first reaction to red fox calls (although I hasten to add I wasn't stoned at the time). If you're not familiar with the dreadful noises a red fox can make, there's video clip in the article. But be warned: humans aren't alone in responding badly. An innocent click on the play button launched a large husky into my lap as she lunged head first into my computer screen, and the cats' fur took more than an hour to resume normal orientation.

Black-backed jackals are up there with the best when it comes to weird calls. Listen to them here (by clicking the website's speaker icon) if you doubt me.
Photo by Johann du Preez.

Of course animal calls are usually only harrowing because you don't know who's doing the shrieking. And like a good crime novel, it's always the most unlikely suspect. A top contender for the 'shock-value' award must surely be the hyrax (or dassie). These innocuous little creatures look like those fabric-covered brick doorstops (complete with button eyes and nose) that kids make at school in the lead up to Father's Day. Rock hyraxes have no appreciable legs, and spend most of their time sitting about in clusters atop boulders, soaking up the sun. Sometimes they'll scamper down the rocks to munch grass or totter about - with endearing ineptitude – in the branches, snacking on leaves. A colony hangs out on the koppies at my study site, and although I see them daily, nary a squeak do they make. But on bright moonlit nights, when you're least expecting it, male hyraxes let rip. Their shocking, maniacal cries (please listen to one here) terrify rivals and humans alike. Tree hyraxes have gone even further to perfect their cover, secreting themselves away by day in tree hollows so they can creep out at night and horrify unsuspecting bystanders.

A rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) trying to look innocent although clearly it's just mugged a picnicker. Hyraxes have changed little during the last 45 million years, apart from varying in size – one species grew lion-sized (urrgh!).
Photo by Arno & Louise Meintjes.

But my favourite alarming call comes from the Kalahari Desert. I worked for many years on the Kalahari Meerkat Project, and each year a new crop of volunteer field assistants arrived. They were mostly young graduates from urban UK, and, initially, they tended to be a bit unsettled by the isolation and wide, desolate landscapes. Now you need to understand that these young people hadn't spent their childhood playing cowboys and Indians; this was the generation that duelled with light sabres, rescued Princess Leia and verbs at the end of their sentences put, hmmm. Now as it happens, the Sand People in Star Wars (those scary hooded entities that ambush Luke Skywalker in the desert of his home planet) communicated with eerie calls virtually indistinguishable from the braying of mules (used for transport by our farm workers). So for me at least, it was a wonderful moment when - trekking with a new volunteer across the dunes in the middle of nowhere - the brays of the Sand People reverberated around us. I loved the look of utter shock and consternation as - just for one moment - they were plunged within their childhood fantasies.

I've heard that the bugling calls of wapiti (North American elk) are very similar to the cries of the Nazgul in the Lord of the Rings movies, so perhaps a whole new generation will experience this same heart-stopping magic. I wonder where the calls of the Dementors in Harry Potter came from...

Impala aglow. This antelope's grunts and roars (hear them here) routinely send my new field assistants scuttling for home.
Photo by Arno & Louise Meintjes.

But the most alarming animal noise that I've ever experienced was made by creatures that potter around my garden nightly. And no, it's not the hippos.

It happened one night a couple of years ago. I was just getting ready for bed when the roaring growl of heavy machinery began emanating from my front garden. Above the steady roar of engines was a very loud pulsing whirr that had that ululating, come-and-go quality of an ambulance siren. The combined noise was so deafening that the student staying here at the time was convinced a helicopter had landed in the garden. To me, it sounded exactly like a UFO (or what a special effects team would conjure up as a scary, unearthly spaceship sound). Since my garden seemed to be free of luridly flashing green light, helicopters or earth-moving equipment, I decided I'd better go out and find out what was happening. Admittedly I did feel a touch of apprehension but, hang it, if a UFO was landing on my doorstep I wanted to know about it.

What I found couldn't have surprised me more, even if it had been a delegation of little green aliens.

Clumped around my compost heap were three highly agitated porcupines and one small honey badger. The honey badger (a species renowned for its 'nothing's too fearsome' approach to life) had clearly been trying it on, and the porcupines were rallying in defence. Now, when my dogs harass the porcupines (a nightly occurrence), the creatures respond by stamping their hind feet (like petulant children), coughing out a growl, and rattling their spines. Their tail quills are hollow so when the porcupine shivers its tail (as a horse shivers its skin to dislodge a fly) they do make quite a dramatic clashing sound (which you can hear here). But I'd no idea that, when seriously pressed, porcupines combined their cacophony of noises into such an amazing and other-worldly din.

If you know of a potential contender for 'Most Alarming Animal Noise', please, please nominate it in a comment.

Never underestimate a rodent. One of the Cape, or southern African, porcupines (Hystrix africaeaustralis) that visits my garden nightly.