CSI: Bush Style

Game drives take place every day on the reserve, and the guides will often radio in any interesting sightings to us at the research camp. As we were finally returning from My First Walk, about 3 hours later than earlier anticipated, one of the guides radioed in to say he had found a wildebeest calf that had recently died. He was unsure of the cause of death because there were no obvious puncture wounds on the carcass. So we went to investigate what had happened and set a camera trap next to the carcass to see what would turn up to feast on it in the subsequent few days.

When we first saw the calf it did not look like it had been killed by an animal, be it leopard or any other carnivore.

However, when it was flipped over there were some small areas where flies had laid their eggs, suggesting there might be puncture wounds there after all.

So Tara began to closely examine the carcass, and a few more potential puncture wounds began to show. We had to keep taking regular measurements from the carcass to help with analysing what we had found later on. It was only when Tara began to skin the animal that several puncture/claw wounds, located all over the carcass, were found. They were given away by deep blood red patches on the flesh of the animal which had been covered up by its fur. 

Now it was clear that the wildebeest had been killed by a predator, so began a discussion about what had done it. Leopards normally kill by suffocating their prey around the throat, and although there were slight marks around throat of the calf, these were not the most pronounced we found. It also seemed less likely that the kill would have been abandoned had it been a leopard that had killed it since there are no other large predators on the reserve that could have scared it off. I guessed jackals; Tara thought Caracal. When we had finished examining the calf we tied it to a tree so it would be in the shade and in full view of the camera trap we left.

Tara later looked up the killing strategies of different animals and how to ID the culprit in cases like this. Looking at the pictures we had taken earlier, the puncture wounds on the wildebeest were 4.5-5cm apart, which is in fact consistent with the distance between the canines of a leopard, and far bigger than that of Caracal or Jackal. The kill was most likely made by one of the adolescent cubs currently residing in the area; they’re about one year old, and not very experienced hunters at this stage. This could explain why the kill appeared so “messy”. Now all we had to do was wait and see whether the camera trap we placed would show whether one, or both, of the cubs would return to the kill.