The sun was slipping down the horizon when a pair of big ears, wing-like, appeared on the crest of the hill.
A little monsoonal drizzle fell and the sky moved with scraps of clouds, making the disc of the sun a blur. And so the light on the pair of ears—which belonged to a Striped hyena—was something of a moving prism. In that magical light, the hyena ventured closer, its head down, its powerful shoulders moving with deliberation.
Soon, the animal would slip away in the night, covering several kilometres, towards a carcass dump. We watched it make its way downhill, and then melt away into the darkness. The monsoon had rendered the usually-brown slope with lush vegetation. In the day, this gave the hyena pack some cover, a place to rest as the day wore on.
For one reason or the other—perhaps the fact that they are nocturnal, perhaps the fact that they have been the villains in Disney movies, perhaps because look like untidy, bedraggled versions of dogs to others, hyenas have mostly been reviled.
They also inhabit areas that are increasingly being taken over by people. A creature of dry, hot places—scrubland and plains—the hyena overlaps with places that become towns or the suburbs of larger cities. Though they are considered fearsome, they aren’t able to move very fast, especially while crossing roads, which means they are hit by vehicles.
In 2021, a hyena was killed in West Bengal, and in Delhi’s shadow, in Gurugram- which has remnant Aravalli forest- hyenas have been killed or injured by cars more than once. They are now a ‘near threatened’ species with suspected decline. Today we have very little information about hyenas and their overall population; we know that they live on the fringes of habitation, escaping our imagination or our attention.
I have seen hyenas in mined, degraded areas in West Bengal, in bare-looking, hellishly hot plains near Agra, and followed their tracks in the ‘badlands’ of Chambal. These areas don’t look like much to us. They may even look like wasted places to us. But they are part of refugia for the hyena.
An animal or bird that scavenges has never been looked on kindly – be it hyenas or vultures. Yet, those that scavenge, that turn rot to energy, that turn the fetid to something that is to be coveted, are crucial links of the natural world. They save poor communities significant energy and costs—if there were no scavengers, people would have to procure wood and burn carcasses. If we had no scavengers, carcasses would rot and spread germs and disease, the thing epidemiologists warn us against. In fact, putting a cost on a hyena’s clean-up efforts may make us sit up and take note.
We need studies and assessments of hyena populations to understand their needs better. We also need to open our minds to the fact that nature’s clean-up crews, the groundskeepers of our landscapes, are in fact just the thing our cluttered world needs.