Most of the time on our daily safaris we just go out into the bush and are excited to see what we will find. However, sometimes it happens that we search for a very specific animal because it may be the only one that a group of guests has not yet found, or because of a specific request. Like this time. The target was a brown hyena. A real challenge! Such targeted expeditions are not always successful. But this time it was. Read the interesting story told by Willem.

 “The family I had on my vehicle for a few days were fascinated by hyenas and definitely wanted to see this rare animal in the wild,” says Willem, the young Rhulani ranger. “To be honest, we have been quite struggling to find hyenas recently, so this was a difficult task.”

But for Willem, nothing is impossible. "That morning I planned to drive towards the Inselbergs and then Thlou Dam. Luckily, my colleague Alasdair made the same choice, so there was the two of us. Near the Inselbergs, Alasdair's voice came over the radio saying that he had found a brown hyena."

Everybody was excited, so in such a situation you should go full throttle straight away so to see the hyena before it disappears again. But Willem was still quite a distance away. What now?

Willem is known as a calm and level-headed person. This often pays off. Willem continued driving at a moderate pace when Alasdair could be heard - again - on the radio. Now he had found lions near the dam! 

Willem continues: "That was the moment when everything got busy and one thing came after another. First I went to the dam, we enjoyed a wonderful view, with a few rhinos and also kudu, and we took the moment for a coffee break before continuing our journey towards the lions. When we were called to enter the sighting, news came over the radio that the a hyena had come out of the thicket again and was clearly visible. We decided to still see the lions first. While we were looking at them, we discovered a brown hyena, which was very close, but then moved away from the lions.”

The guests had already seen lions a few times during their stay, so Willem decided to move out and follow this one hyena. It walked slowly and went up the mountain. No problem to follow by car.

Willem says: "And suddenly there was a second hyena, a bit further up the mountain. Soon after the two met, but I realized they weren't friends. The hyena we were following wanted the other one out of its territory! And so we were watching a wild chase: Up the mountain, left the mountain, down the mountain again, and when they were very close to our vehicle, a fight broke out, as I had never seen before. They both jumped up at each other, making the typical screeching noises of hyenas, we could see their teeth biting each other. In the end, the younger of the two hyenas won the fight and chased the older one out of the area. That was really exciting!”

And the best at the end: Everything was captured with spectacular photos by the camera of our guest Mr. Jan Kubinec, which were made available to us with many thanks!