Nor do researchers know what controls wild dog numbers in many places.Īll of these researchers are awed-and challenged-by the nomadic life of these animals. "Surprisingly, we do not yet have good, reliable estimates of the size of many important wild dog populations," Creel says. Weldon "Tico" McNutt, has a similar long-term project in Africa's Okavango delta called the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Today, they study wild dogs and other large carnivores in reserves in Zambia.Īnother team, led by J. They wrote a book about wild dogs, and ultimately concluded that the animals were rare when lions and hyenas were common, as those larger predators could steal the wild dogs' prey and sometimes prey upon them as well. In 1990, very little was known about why wild dogs were always found at low densities-averaging between 300 to 1200 square kilometers per pack-and the Creels spent 5 years in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania trying to find out, leaving only after their infant daughter got very sick. "They are complex social carnivores very similar to human families." "Wild dogs sound like birds, cats and dogs," they say. During their 9 years watching wild dogs in Zimbabwe, Robbins and McCreery tracked known individuals to learn how packs formed and changed through time and cataloged the range of vocalizations. In contrast, Creel and his wife, Nancy Creel, and independently Robert Robbins and Kim McCreery, who founded the African Wild Dog Conservancy in Tucson, Arizona, have studied wild dogs in reserves. "By working on a community conservation area rather than a centrally protected national park, they have extended our understanding of wild dog ecology," says Scott Creel, a behavioral ecologist at Montana State University, Bozeman. When she realized wild dogs were back in the area, she and her colleagues immediately began to look into how these carnivores might coexist with people outside reserves. "Wild dogs are victims of their own wide-ranging behavior-they wander so far that most reserves are too small to contain them," she explains. "I burst into tears," recalls Woodroffe, a conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).Īt the time, she was studying how people coexist with lions, but 2 years earlier she had co-authored a species survival plan for wild dogs, and the prospects hadn't looked promising. But one day in 1999, three females jumped out of the bush onto the road in front of Rosie Woodroffe as she was driving back to the center. Wild dogs had disappeared from that part of Kenya in the early 1980s. For the past 3 months, Stefanie Strebel, project manager for the Kenya Rangelands Wild Dog and Cheetah Project, based at the Mpala center, has monitored the movements of these animals, continuing an effort begun in 2001. Today's mystery: locating one of the numerous packs that roam the 20,000-hectare Mpala ranch and research center grounds. Dogs take a long time to mate-wild dogs do it in a minute or less. Compared with their domesticated namesakes, wild dogs have bigger ears, lack the fifth dewclaw on the front feet, and have a distinctive musty smell like the badger that they are distant cousins with. Dogs, wolves, and coyotes can all interbreed but not with wild dogs, which are sometimes called painted wolves because of their colorful and variable coat patterns. Yet they are quite vulnerable, and even though several teams of researchers have dedicated large chunks of their lives following these animals, much about them remains mysterious.ĭespite the name, Lycaon pictus is a distant relative of household canines. They are full of wanderlust, and their packs show camaraderie and coordination to rival the best military unit. But along the way, I came to appreciate their incredible story. It was a dusty, bumpy ride into the bush, for a fleeting view of animals that aren't really dogs after all. Once so common in Africa that they were shot as vermin, the elusive canines are becoming poster children for conservation: Fewer than 7000 are left in Africa, their native range.Ī reporter visiting the center, I love dogs and so jumped at the chance to track some down in advance of the tourists' arrival. But for the tourists who helicoptered into this somewhat remote region of central Kenya last month, wild dogs topped their list. MPALA RESEARCH CENTRE, KENYA-Most visitors to Africa come for the lions, elephants, and rhinos.
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