By Kristie Weeks, University of Montana
When I was 4 years old, my parents told my two older brothers and me that if we saved our money, we could buy any breed of puppy that we wanted. Even though it was several years ago, I still remember picking out my miniature dachshund, Bubbles.
When I look at Bubbles, it’s hard to believe that she’s related to big dogs like Saint Bernards or Great Danes, let alone wild animals like wolves or foxes. It’s shocking to see how diverse our concept of what being a “dog” is. The other day on transect, I was reminded of this diversity. While doing herbivore surveys in Mababe, our escort guide, Bonny, suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that?!”. As we slowly crept forward though, we quickly realized that the animals were African Wild Dogs! Also known as Lycaon pictus, wild dogs are critically endangered and one of the rarest animals in Botswana. The group that we stumbled upon was a pack of 8 individuals meandering through an open pan in the middle of a dense Mopane scrub forest. The group was comprised of both males and females, and they were mostly adults. As we watched, they ran through the pan and straight to a large hole that elephants had dug up to reach the water table. As they drank from the small puddle, we admired their beautiful markings.
Wild dogs have extremely large, rounded dark ears. Their noses are solid black, and they have black markings that stretch up their face and around their eyes like a mask. Their faces and bodies are a tan-yellowish color with white, brown, and dark markings, and they each have a brown bar wrapping around their neck below the ear. Since the markings on their bodies are all different, individuals are easy to distinguish. At the end of their tails, they have fluffy white tips that help pack members keep track of them and act as a “Follow me!” signal during a hunt. Despite being smaller than hyenas and having fairly skinny bodies, wild dogs easily take down ungulates like Impala and Red Lechwe by taking turns during a chase and exhausting their prey.
A few minutes into watching the wild dogs, we noticed that a larger, solitary male was joining the pack from the edge of the mopane scrub. When he reached the waterhole, one of the other wild dogs knelt down with its butt in the air and ears back as if to show submission. The two sniffed one another’s necks then separated and drank water with the group. As soon as the large male who had joined last began walking away from the waterhole, the pack followed. Based on his size and the way that he led, our instructor, Samara, said that he was probably the alpha male. Wild dog packs are composed of a hierarchy like that of Gray Wolves in the United States. An alpha pair runs the pack and is followed by slightly less dominant, subordinate individuals. The dominant pair has most of the young, and when subordinate females do occasionally have young, they are less likely to survive since they will only receive food after the alpha pairs’ young have fed. In this area, wild dogs typically begin breeding in June or July, have a gestation period of about 70 days and have litters of 10 to 15 pups. Pups stay in dens made out of old aardvark burrows and will nibble at the corner of females’ mouths when they return from a hunt to make them regurgitate food. They then feed veraciously, with little fighting compared to other carnivores around a carcass. Pups begin travelling with the pack after 3 months and join hunting trips the next winter.
Although this sighting only lasted a few minutes, it was more than enough time to fill us with complete awe at how beautiful wild dogs are. We couldn’t help but smile the rest of the morning as we thought of how lucky we were to observe such rare creatures. As wild dogs’ populations are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and diseases like canine distemper and rabies, experiences like this make studying and performing research in Botswana increasingly meaningful. Regardless of whether our day is packed with exciting stories of animals like lions and wild dogs greeting each other or more mundane stories of resting at camp playing cards as the rainy season rolls in, each experience is a reminder of how unique Africa is, how beautiful its animals are, and how important it is to continue monitoring and conserving wildlife populations.