(slow intense music) (casual upbeat music) (airplanes whooshing) - [Doug Voiceover] I'm in Malawi in Central Africa.

I've been invited by a wildlife research group called Conservation Research Africa, whose mission is to reduce conflict between people and the wild animals they encounter everyday.

For people living in Malawi's capital, Lilongwe, spotted hyenas are a particular problem, or maybe the hyenas have a people problem.

(soft contemplative music) - [Doug] How's it going?

- Brennan.

- Get some hyenas today?

- Oh yeah.

- Hey, nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

- Our current project is the urban hyena project, so trying to understand the urban hyena ecology, the associated human wildlife conflict that occurs.

Africa as a continent is projected to have some of the highest population growths over the next 50 years.

With hyenas right in the middle of a dense urban environment, you have quite a lot of conflict, or at least the potential for a lot of conflict - [Doug Voiceover] These hyenas make dens in the woodlands and find food in the farmland all around Lilongwe.

Right now, the city is small enough that a hyena can move from den to farmland without encountering many people.

But Lilongwe may double its size in the next 10 years.

To help the animals survive, the city plans to protect strips of habitat called wildlife corridors that connect the hyena's living and feeding grounds, as well as the territory of other hyena groups.

Tracking where the animals move now shows what habitat needs to be protected in the future.

- Yeah, I think we'll just go ahead and get our capture set up, yeah?

- Oh okay.

- So we'll get the goat out there.

We put it 20 yards out from the vehicle.

- Yeah.

- [Brennan] Stake it down to the ground so the hyenas can't drag it out of darting range.

- [Doug Voiceover] Brennan wants to capture a hyena tonight and put a collar on it that sends location information to a satellite.

To do that, the team needs to knock out the target.

The bait is a dead goat.

- Catherine, if you wouldn't mind pulling those diazepam tablets out?

- Box of tricks.

(Catherine laughs) I'm the mixologist in terms of getting the cocktail in the dart appropriate.

And then Brennan's going to do the darting with said drugs, and then when the animal is down, I'm the anesthetist, essentially.

So I am checking heart rate, respiratory rate, depth of anesthesia to basically make sure we all keep our hands.

- [Doug Voiceover] In addition to putting calming drugs in the bait, Brennan's got what looks like an air rifle.

He'll use that to shoot a dart loaded with the knockout dose.

The drug doesn't work instantly, though, and the dart stings when it hits.

So a hyena will run after it's darted.

Usually the researchers have to chase the animal on foot, which can be tricky and dangerous at night, so Brennan is hoping my drone can track the hyena after he's darted it.

- My role is to ID the animals as they're coming in, so I have an infrared scope that I can look at spot patterns or features, and then we can tell which ones we want, or if it's ones we don't want, then we just ignore it, let it feed, and then just hope the other ones come in.

- [Doug Voiceover] Sam spreads the drugged chicken.

Eating it will make the hyena hungry and less cautious, more likely to approach the bait.

(animal calling) - [Automated Voice] Please check it on the map.

- [Doug Voiceover] The team has successfully darted and put satellite tracking collars on several female hyenas.

Now they want to collar a young male.

At between two and three years old, males tend to leave their family group or clan.

Understanding where these males go next and who else lives there is an important part of hyena ecology.

To attract the hyenas, Brennan plays recorded sounds of wildlife over a loudspeaker.

This one is a water buffalo stuck in the mud.

That would be a good meal for a hungry hyena clan.

(water buffalo bleating) - [Sam] They're at the treeline now.

(soft music) - It's Urban 16.

- Yeah.

- [Doug Voiceover] This female hyena, named Urban 16, is wearing a satellite collar that the team put on earlier this year.

It's pretty exciting to see her appear out of the darkness and come up to the bait.

I can see the size and sheer strength.

Hyenas are definitely an impressive animal.

This young male is Urban 16's son.

- No snares on either of them, huh?

They both look good.

Back leg looks good on him as well.

Hyenas are awesome.

Popular media has given them a bad reputation.

Probably the most well-known would be "Lion King".

They're depicted as cowardly scavengers.

Reality, hyenas hunt most of their own food, they're highly intelligent.

They're more intelligent than lions.

They have a higher success rate when they hunt than lions.

Their whole clan hierarchy led by females.

Their whole physiology, really unique, really interesting.

Kind of an underdog species.

I think people who say that hyenas are ugly haven't seen a hyena.

(soft music) That's a perfect shot right there.

- [Doug] You're not gonna dart this one?

- [Brennan] No, he's too small.

You wanna wait until they're at least two years, two and a half years.

Because he's gonna probably double in size.

We wouldn't be able to put the collar loose enough right now to allow for that growth.

It's good to have just these positive baiting interactions where there's no disturbance.

Once they're finished eating, if they move down, then we might put the drone up to see if that other male might be in the area somewhere.

The face that they're calling is good though.

This could bring him in if he's in the area.

(hyenas whooping) - [Doug Voiceover] There are two other hyenas out here making sounds called whoops.

They're communication calls to other hyenas, and sometimes mean come here.

But nobody new shows up, and the four hyenas in the field begin to move away, so I launch the drone to see where they go.

(bright exciting music) - [Brennan] The one on the bottom is going right for that one house.

Catherine, Love, do you guys want to have a look at where we're approaching this village area, so it will be interesting to see what that interaction might look like, how they might try and sniff out a meal.

So you can see just behind them, there's like a block of trees.

- [Doug] Yup.

- [Brennan] So that'll be a graveyard.

- Like a human graveyard?

- Yeah, human graveyard.

So-- - Sacred.

You can't cut trees.

- Yeah, you can't cut trees.

You can't, you know you don't go in there.

So they act as little sanctuaries basically for all kinds of animals.

- [Doug] There they're going towards that house.

- [Brennan] Yeah, go on in closer.

I wonder if those people in that house have any idea.

- [Doug] Yeah.

- [Brennan] What's going outside their door.

- [Doug Voiceover] These hyenas don't seem afraid at all, and that's generally a bad thing for wild animals.

This is like a perfect recipe for human wildlife conflict.

- My home village has the same setup.

- [Doug] Looks sort of similar?

- Yeah, and hyenas do come.

But people notice especially during the rainy season because they leave the footsteps.

But during the dry season, they don't know when they're close, but sometimes they also steal their livestock, so they notice in the morning.

They sometimes just find maybe a head left.

- Yeah.

That one just went right up to the edge of the house, just sniffed it, and then.

Having the drone with the infrared camera was hugely useful, and very interesting as well, to see those second by second movements.

Watching the clan, how they interact with each other, how they move through village areas.

That was all something that you miss with the collars.

Could be very useful to then tailor in strategies to combat human wildlife conflict.

- [Doug Voiceover] Understanding the hyenas hunting habits can help local farmers protect their families and livestock without using snares or weapons.

I think the drone shows that hyenas can live alongside humans, as long as the conditions are right.

(bright music) The hyenas we saw sleep in the Lilongwe Wildlife Sanctuary.

It's right in the middle of the city, and the reason they're called urban hyenas.

Urban 16 has two young cubs living here, and Brennan has satellite collar data from last night to review.

- So this is Ernest.

He's our education and outreach coordinator.

So whenever we're working in villages doing human wildlife conflict surveys, working with schools, education programs, Ernest is the man for that.

- How has the response been?

- Well, it's tough.

Whenever we are dealing with conservation, we have to deal with people as well.

- Yeah.

- So everything we are doing here as Conservation Research Africa, we take the data and bring a program to the community, like how best can we resolve a certain problem.

I find my job very exciting because I get to involve a lot of people.

- Are you from around this area?

- Born and raised.

- Oh okay, oh cool.

- I was born here, and I'm enjoying doing this here in my land, so yeah, it's awesome.

- Yeah, that's great you're doing it.

- So people here in Malawi are really receptive when it comes to conservations.

Just like COVID interrupted most of the activities, so community outreach has been slow at the moment, but yeah, we're trying our best still trying to engage with the communities.

- So one of the collared hyenas, one of the females, currently has two cubs at one of the dens here.

We have camera traps at the dens, so we'll go and check those camera traps, and we use those for longterm monitoring, gives us updates on the health of the clan.

- Yeah.

- And what animals are associating with other animals, what other animals are around.

I think we'll head in and check the computer, then.

- [Doug] Okay.

- Yeah, so this is the web interface where we track the collars on the hyenas that we put on earlier this year.

So I'm just wanting to check on Urban 16, the one who has the cubs.

Every couple weeks, sometimes it's every few months, they'll move between the dens.

- Nice little green swatch form, huh?

- Yeah, so you can see, you've got a nice little chunk of forested land here.

- [Doug] Yeah.

- And like I was saying, pretty much right in the middle of the city.

And then Lilongwe River flows out of the city through this area, where it's currently not developed, and it flows out past the Kambali lodge property, which is where we were out baiting the other night.

You can see the movements from the den here and the sanctuary out into some of these village and rural areas, in the outskirts of the city.

- [Doug Voiceover] The collared data shows the importance of wildlife corridors.

Without the forested stretch along the river, these hyenas would be forced to use the roads to get to their feeding areas.

That means more interaction with humans.

- So we're here in this building, just right here.

And then this is what we call Den 2.

So I think we'll head down there, and we'll check the camera trap that's there.

- Yeah.

- And just verify that the cubs are still at that den with her.

There are other cities throughout Africa that have hyenas that come and go, but it's quite rare to have hyenas actually denning, reproducing, raising cubs right in the middle of the city.

The hyenas are definitely at a much higher risk from humans than the humans are from the hyenas.

Hit by cars, snares.

We haven't had a recorded human attack from the urban clan since the project's been going, but we've lost many, many hyenas.

So we'll just start most recent, and there's our snare.

There's one of the little cubs.

- [Doug] Oh yeah.

- This morning at 4:30.

- Huh.

- They're getting big.

- [Brennan] There's the mom.

Remember her from before?

- Oh.

- [Brennan] They share these dens with porcupines.

You get some funny pictures sometimes.

Porcupines chasing the cubs out.

Yeah, so there's the two cubs.

When they're born, and for the first couple months, they have a dark, black coat without really any spots, and then that slowly fades, and the spots start to come in.

So they're just about the age where we can actually ID them and add them to our database.

You can see the two cubs playing with the mom rolling around on the ground.

Probably trying to nurse, she's the one.

- [Doug Voiceover] Young pups means this clan is healthy and strong, for now.

Conservation Research Africa is working with the city of Lilongwe to create wildlife corridors, and it's up to people like Ernest to encourage the human residents to respect the protected habitat.

But the research team still hasn't collared a young male, and that data will be vital for the city's conservation plans.

So we get back to work.

- Hey there.

- All right.

- You all right there?

- Yeah.

- So yeah, we're at a new spot.

Different clan.

There's a young male here, about roughly two, maybe two and a half years old.

We suspect that he'll be dispersing soon.

That's about the age that they disperse, if they're going to.

And some of the behavior we've seen between him and some of the adult females in the clan, seems like they're trying to push him on his way.

So we can get a collar on him before he leaves, should give us that good data of where he might actually disperse to.

We've only recently in the last, about, four or five months identified it.

He's usually one of the first ones to come into the bait, usually on its own.

When we first started, he was a little bit shy, but through progressive baiting, it's become more and more willing to come in and present us with a broad side potential for darting.

Same setup as before.

We've got the bait out there, 20 yards.

We'll place some calls.

Yeah.

(laughing) Yeah.

- [Doug] Nice and ripe.

- Yeah, good stuff for them.

- Yeah.

- So yeah, around sunset we'll get the calls going, and see what comes in.

Hopefully get a shot.

(monitor beeping) (drone chiming) (blades whirring) - [Doug Voiceover] I enjoy working with nocturnal animals because it makes the best use of my infrared camera.

Hopefully the young male Brennan has identified will come into the bait, and we can dart and collar him.

(insects chirping) (slow suspenseful music) (animal bleating) - [Brennan] See what that does.

It's gotta be him, huh?

- [Sam] The right size, yeah.

I think it is him.

- [Brennan] Catherine, can we get the dart?

- [Sam] Who is it?

- [Brennan] Bunda 2.

No sorry, Bunda 4, yeah.

Took some intestines, huh?

- [Doug Voiceover] This looks like the perfect shot, but the hyena's out of Brennan's 20 meter range.

- [Brennan] He's probably like 35 meters.

Yeah, it's a bit far.

He'll come back.

Once he smells those chickens.

He'll like the chicken better than the intestine.

Is Doug ready?

- [Sam] He's ready.

(bright contemplative music) - [Doug Voiceover] The dart feels about like a shot you'd get at the doctors.

The hyena doesn't like it, but it's not a serious injury.

(drone chiming) Now it's my job to track him until the drugs take effect.

(drone engine buzzing) - [Brennan] Right.

Can we go up in altitude a bit?

So it's quieter.

Okay, now just go straight out, 12 o'clock.

Still 12 o'clock, Sam?

- [Sam] Two o'clock.

Heading towards three o'clock now.

I think he's out in the open a bit now.

- That's him there.

- Here?

- Yeah, that's him.

Looking a bit wobbly, actually.

Oh man, that's so nice.

- Yeah.

- Don't have to go running after him.

(both chuckling) Usually it's a mad dash in the car.

- [Doug] He's falling over.

- [Brennan] Okay.

Let's just hover.

- [Doug] Oh, he's down.

- Yeah, okay.

So another maybe two minutes.

We'll just wait.

(soft music) Yeah, I think we can drive over.

(car engine starts) - With every species, the way that you tell the depth of anesthesia is a little bit different, so for hyena, perhaps the best indicator of how deep they are, meaning how sleepy they are, is jaw tone, so if I pull on their mandible, and they pull it back at all, we know we need to give them more drugs.

If it's nice and slack, they're asleep, everybody's safe.

The jaw tone's loose, yeah.

- Big head.

- Yeah, really big.

- As I walk up to the hyena, I'm blown away with how big a hyena is.

They're buff like a pit bull dog, but they're way, way bigger, and way more buffer than even the buffest of pit bulls, so yeah, it's an impressive animal to say the least, and the paws, and the massive size of its neck and head are even bigger in person when you walk up close to one.

- [Brennan] So do you wanna help me with the collar?

Slide it on?

- [Doug] And how long does a collar stay on for?

- Until the battery reaches a critical low, and then we activate a drop-off mechanism.

So this bit right here will actually detach.

And then the collar will just drop off.

So from an ethics perspective, it's great because we don't have to dart him again.

- That was pretty cool to be able to put a GPS collar on a hyena, and know that it will help them track the hyenas, and inevitably hopefully pressure the government to keep putting more habitat preserve for the hyenas, so to be part of that was, yeah.

It was pretty special.

- Yeah, he's getting some proper jaw tone now.

- Okay.

- [Catherine] Okee dokee.

- [Brennan] All right.

(soft music) - [Doug Voiceover] Any time you put an animal to sleep, there's some risk that they won't wake up, so I'm relieved to see him moving, and looking like the ordeal has left no permanent injury.

He's in no pain.

Now we need to watch him until the veterinarians are sure he doesn't hurt himself while he's woozy.

- [Brennan] Okay, Doug?

Yeah.

(drone engine buzzing) If we can just go up to like 200 feet again, just so we don't stress him too much while he's still a bit groggy.

- [Doug] He's like, I don't know about you buddy.

- [Catherine] Oh there's a friend, yeah.

- Yeah, so they're kind of, they're really curious, but they're a bit wary as well.

I mean, obviously he's gonna smell a bit like us.

Watching him as he fully woke up through the drone, that was really interesting.

And seeing him move back with the clan was really cool as well.

We know he's submissive.

We saw a little interaction where the other two came and gave him probably a little nip and said what's going on?

There he was fully integrated then back to normal.

- [Catherine] I feel this is like cheating (all chuckling) - [Brennan] It's too easy.

- Yeah.

- [Brennan] What we've learned from this will be really helpful to guiding our use of drones and infrared cameras for our future research.

- [Doug Voiceover] I've always thought the drone was a safe way to study animal behavior, and would be helpful for wildlife conservation but I think we were all surprised at how much we learned about the hyenas with every flight.

I had no idea they were so smart and social, and the collar we've put on tonight will give the urban hyena team important information that will help preserve and protect these amazing animals for years to come.

(upbeat music) Filming wild animals in Africa has always been a dream for me, and I'm excited to see what else my drone can do here in Malawi.

Whoa.

A baboon fight.

He's like, I see you.

- This is my friend Doug.

- Oh, you are most welcome.

- Hi.

(drone engine buzzing) So where are the bats at?

Oh whoa.

There's a bunch of them.

(drone engine buzzing)