Hi all,

This isn’t going to be the most exciting post ever, as I’ve been doing admin for the past few days (urrrgh) but I just wanted to respond to a query in the comments from the last post… The fact that we haven’t found the dens doesn’t necessarily mean the dogs aren’t denning.  These are incredibly elusive animals, with HUGE home ranges (recorded up to 1200km²), which makes them pretty tough to find. Although they tend to use much smaller home ranges when they are denning, this means they leave fewer tracks on the roads, making it hard to find spoor.  Also, many packs seem to den in very dense, hard-to-access areas.    

Gratuitous picture of wild dog spoor to make this post more interesting 

However, we do think that two packs are probably not denning this year, due to the fact that we have managed to locate them fairly frequently (one pack even has a VHF collar), usually during the middle of the day, and they are always in different places.  When the dogs are denning, they usually rest up at the dens in the middle of the day, i.e. always in the same place… It’s also very obvious when the alpha females are pregnant or lactating and we are pretty sure that for these two packs, they are not either.

Possible reasons for this were mentioned in a previous blog: for one pack the alpha male was killed and no males unrelated to the alpha female have joined the pack.  For the other, it is possible that the alpha female was killed.  Alternatively this latter pack may just be denning late – although May-August is peak denning season, nature has a habit of proving exceptions to every rule, and maybe this pack will start denning soon.  As for the others – they probably are denning and I’m sure we’ll find the dens soon. (How’s that for optimism?).

Back in a couple of days with more news/general waffle,

Rosemary

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