Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Spotted hyenas
In the Ethiopian city of Harar, an ancient tradition sees local people welcome these fierce creatures through the city gates and feed them
As the urban landscape expands at an alarming rate, many creatures are having to adapt to new concrete surroundings. You might expect wildlife would struggle to integrate into city life, but the world’s metropolises provide food, water, shelter and places to raise a family – and in many cities mankind is learning to live in harmony with its wild neighbours.
There is now a higher concentration of leopards in the Indian city of Mumbai than anywhere else on the planet. As the city has encroached further and further into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the big cats’ natural home, so this nocturnal predator has embraced the opportunity to take advantage of everything the city has to offer. Yet most Mumbai citizens are barely aware these majestic creatures exist, as they stay in the shadows to hunt at night, thriving on a diet of stray dogs, rats, deer, feral pigs and goats. And although this means it requires enormous skill – and precision equipment – to film them, the BBC team captured footage of leopards casually drinking from wells on the outskirts of the city and strolling through inner-city neighbourhoods.
But the most dramatic images are of a leopard enjoying an opportunistic meal. Cameraman Gordon Buchanan spent 27 fruitless nights in his hide in the heart of the city before finally striking gold. And when he did get his footage, it was thanks to a specially adapted ex-military thermal camera which picks out the shape and form of the animals because of the heat they generate. ‘Gordon filmed a leopard making off with a piglet from under the nose of its mother, who was woken by its squeals and gave chase,’ says series producer Tom Hugh-Jones. ‘It’s remarkable footage, proving it to be true that you often get the best images right at the end of a shoot because you get to know the animals better. Gordon did this and reaped the rewards.’
Around the world an area the size of Britain is urbanised every ten years, and woodlands and grasslands – the habitat of a creature like the leopard – are destroyed. In India, where several of the animals featured in the Cities documentary live, the advance of the urban sprawl is especially marked. A largely rural country, just 11 per cent of its people lived in urban areas in 1900. Yet by 2030, 41 per cent – 625 million people – are expected to be city dwellers.
Another creature successfully adapting to life in India’s cities, and being accepted by humans, is the rhesus
macaque monkey. Associated with the Hindu god Hanuman, the monkeys, which are often found around temples and other sacred sites, are venerated by the locals even though they can be pests. A BBC team caught up with them in Jaipur, and was impressed at how effective the macaque has become at stealing food, often from under the noses of its human victims. ‘They’re cunning, proper little thieves,’ says Tom Hugh-Jones. ‘A macaque can identify a person it knows it can freak out and steal food from. They’re also
great at stealth. We have footage of one waiting for someone to turn their back, and then climbing down and stealing a bottle of orange juice. It’s bold and successful.’
Like urban foxes in Britain, raccoons, native to North America, are the right size to succeed in cities, where they’ve learned to open doors with their dextrous hands and squeeze through the smallest gaps. After the young kits leave their dens the mother will guide them through the city, teaching the techniques they’ll need to
survive. For one kit though, whose mother had made her den in a chimney, leaving home was easier said than done. ‘The mother only had one more baby of her litter of seven to bring down from the roof to the ground 30ft below,’ says the producer of the Cities episode Fredi Devas. ‘That’s not a problem on her own, but when you’re holding a new baby it’s a different matter, and we recorded them making their perilous descent via a drainpipe. It’s dramatic, frightening – we couldn’t be sure she wasn’t going to let the baby slip. Happily, they both made it in one piece.’
One of the most extraordinary stories of animals adapting to city life came in the Ethiopian city of Harar. Here, spotted hyenas have been coexisting with humans for four centuries: special hyena gateways in the city’s ancient walls are testimony to the longevity of their relationship. ‘It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,’ says Fredi, who spent three weeks filming in Harar. ‘The hyenas are given meat and then use their incredibly strong jaws to crunch up the bones from the meat market, providing a refuse service for the city.’
The hyenas here have miraculously become docile creatures, at one with man. In some cases, they were even filmed eating meat directly from a human’s mouth. ‘Yusuf, a fifthgeneration “hyena man”, would bite on the meat and hold it in his mouth for a creature called Willi II,’ says Fredi. ‘Yusuf’s daughter-in-law was breastfeeding and a hyena came into the kitchen and just sniffed the baby’s head while the mother carried on.’ In Townsville in Queensland, Australia, Fredi’s team spent three weeks tracking the romantic progress of a bowerbird. The pigeon-sized creatures are remarkable for the homes, or bowers, they build for themselves. These are 3ft-long twig-lined avenues leading to ‘courts’, which are decorated with colour- coordinated arrangements of ornaments to appeal to potential mates. Green glass fragments are a particular favourite of the bowerbirds that have colonised the city, although the 25-year- old male filmed by Fredi and his team had a liking for red items, stealing a red toy car and a red fabric love heart from a rival’s bower and placing them prominently in his court.
Not that it did him much good. After spending a considerable amount of time finding the precise place to site his newly acquired items the lustful bowerbird made a terrible mistake. ‘He attracted interest, but from a juvenile male rather than a female,’ says Fredi. ‘In his defence they do look rather similar, but it was obviously a bit of an embarrassment for our bird. To make matters worse, the young imposter stole the love heart and took it back to his own bower! As we say in the documentary, it’s not easy
finding sex in the city!’