Hyena, hide and seek

By Dom Walter, Producer/Director

It was 03:15 when my alarm went off – a truly uncivilised hour that no one should ever see, unless they're getting to witness some great wildlife behaviour. I crawled out of my tent bleary-eyed and met the crew. After fuelling up with coffee, we checked the kit, packed the car, and resigned ourselves to the fact that we were now living on hyena time. These mischievous creatures love an early start.

An hour-long drive later, we arrived at their den, tucked away in a shady ebony grove. And what a scene it was. Pure chaos. The hyena cubs had a serious case of the zoomies. With wild-eyed glee, they did laps around the filming car like toddlers at a soft play centre, cackling, giggling, and using their sleeping mothers’ bellies as launchpads for extra airtime. Olympic-level nonsense. Then came the mongoose and the baboons. The cubs spotted them like tiny, furry missiles locking onto new targets with naughty glints in their eyes. We could practically feel the mothers rolling their eyes in unison as their offspring barrelled into their new neighbours with zero self-awareness and maximum enthusiasm.

It was complete mayhem and absolutely perfect. This was going to make a fantastic sequence. That’s the magic of filming hyenas at their den: you never quite know what you’re going to get. It’s like nature’s version of reality TV. But it wasn't always as easy as this...

Before we started filming in 2021, each producer was allocated one species to film. The idea being that one person manages all the shoots and developing stories of that species. I was given the task of filming hyenas, a far cry from the majesty of lions or the grace of leopards, but I’m all for an underdog and was up for the challenge. Little did I know quite how big the challenge was…

After months of research and 34 hours of travelling, I finally arrived in South Luangwa National Park, keen to get started and put my recently learnt hyena knowledge to use. But very quickly the almightiness of this task became apparent… Our science partners were only just starting their hyena research project, and none of them yet had tracking collars, as some of the other species did. I knew that hyena territories are huge, but I underestimated just how elusive they were. And when asking around I was met with “Good luck finding them” or “Yeah, I have seen them, but only in the hours before sunrise, at a distance, running off into the bushes…” How was I supposed to capture the drama and big events of this species if I cannot even find them!

Undeterred, and fuelled by blind naivety, I set out to find something fixed and reliable that would give us a chance of learning more about these mysterious hyenas; we needed to find their den. Their den is a safe place to be social, and it is where the females gather to raise their young during their vulnerable first year of life. Finding this would help us unlock all the information we needed to build their story – who is who, how many of them are there, who is their queen, and so on. But one of the unique features of South Luangwa is its dense mosaic of habitats – ebony groves, rivers, open plains, mopane forests, and beaches that all sit side by side, all beautiful but all incredibly hard to move around in. THE DEN COULD BE ANYWHERE!

I had a well-tested method up my sleeve… Camera traps – small box-shaped cameras that can be fixed to a tree and automatically start filming when something moves in front of them. They were our secret weapon, and we deployed them far and wide. Dreams of finding a bustling hyena den on the footage were nearly always quelled by hours of leaves blowing or confused warthogs looking directly down the lens. Although we did get the occasional nice treat from time to time. A few notable moments included porcupine babies emerging from their den and hanging out with their mother, and the time an aardvark turned up snuffling around for ants, completely unaware that the ants were just chilling on its back! Although incredibly rare, they are still not the hyenas we were searching for.

After weeks of nothing, returning to the camp to tales from the other filming teams of epic lion hunts and leopard and dog interactions, morale was starting to dip in the hyena squad. But at that moment we received some hope in the form of intel from a local villager.

Deep in the forests they had seen all the tell-tale signs of hyena activity: a network of deep holes, white hyena poo, gnawed bones and fresh prints of different-sized paws all around. That night we deployed the full armoury of our camera traps, all three of them, to this hopeful spot and anxiously awaited the results.

The next morning, we checked the traps with great anticipation only to find the cameras had been triggered by, once again… blowing leaves! Nevertheless, the hope was still alive, and we kept going. After a couple more days, we got our first sighting on one of the cameras – a small hyena cub.

We had to tread carefully – the hyena family needed time to get used to the camera traps and eventually our filming car, but we soon earned the trust of the clan and started to get a privileged peek into their secret lives. Over the next couple of months, we slowly introduced the filming car to the family and eventually earned the trust of the clan.

But just as we were starting to make progress, disaster struck… Fires raged through the woodland, reducing the den to ashes. This caused huge concern amongst the team, and a tense return to their den after it was safe to do so revealed that the hyena family were nowhere to be seen – they had moved on. Hopefully the hyena were fine – they are used to fires here – but as a filming team we were back to square one… Time to dust off the camera traps again! After many more weeks, we eventually managed to find a new den much further south than the original. Here is where the characters we followed and filmed over the course of the series, Tandala and Tenta, had their young.

Over the years of filming, working with our science partners, we identified over 50 individuals through their unique spot patterns and built up their family trees. Whereas in the core of the park they were hostile and always looking to steal kills, in the privacy of their woodland den, the adults were caring and nurturing to one another whilst their cubs were excitable and hilarious. This was the side of hyenas we dreamed of showcasing, the real side of them. A side that will hopefully be surprising to viewers and helps to fight common misconceptions of these incredibly smart and endearing animals.