Our Hyena Cubs
Hyena Cubs on Sir Bani Yas Island from TDIC on Vimeo.
Tuesday 2 Febuary, 2010
Sir Bani Yas Island celebrates the birth of two healthy hyena cubs.
The cubs were born sometime in early December 2009, in the Arabian Wildlife Park on Sir Bani Yas Island.
| Desert Islands invites everyone to spread the message of the hyenas by helping us name the two cubs. To suggest your male and female name visit our Wildlife Blog. |
The hyenas were discovered by conservation staff on the island in January. As the Arabian Wildlife Park is a wild environment where animals roam freely, the parents instinctively sought to protect and hide their young thereby illustrating to the conservation staff that the Park creates a natural environment.
The births are of particular significance as the Striped Hyena is completely extinct in the United Arab Emirates and is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as ‘near threatened’ worldwide. IUCN is the official body who monitor the status of nature and wildlife across the world. These are the first hyenas to be born wild in the UAE for many years.
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Click image to send a postcard featuring one of the hyena cubs. |
History of the hyenas on Sir Bani Yas.
The Striped Hyena breeding programme on Sir Bani Yas Island started on the 25th of June 2008, with a trial release programme consisting of two unrelated Striped Hyenas; Phiri the female and Arnold the male. They were brought onto the island from captive-bred populations to begin a breeding program with free-ranging animals introduced into the Arabian Wildlife Park.
Phiri and Arnold’s first enclosure was approximately 2.5 hectares in size, where they learned skills necessary for survival in the wild. From this first enclosure, they moved to a larger camp of 8 hectares and were fitted with radio tracking collars. In August 2009, the pair were released into the Arabian Wildlife Park to be self sufficient, and have now successfully bred.
Both parents were taught how to hunt and survive on Sir Bani Yas Island, and from a conservation perspective their species fills a very important role in restoring the ecology and predator-prey relations in the Arabian Wildlife Park where they reside.
Phiri, the cubs’ mother, was raised by the staff at Sharjah Breeding Centre and was brought on to the island in 2008 as part of a trial breeding programme and later released into the Arabian Wildlife Park in 2009.
The birth of these two cubs has now brought the number of Striped Hyenas on Sir Bani Yas Island to 8.
Striped Hyena Facts
- The Striped Hyena is an omnivorous mammal. It lives in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and western India.
- The Striped Hyena is largely a scavenger, but will also eat small animals, fruit and insects, though larger subspecies are known to hunt animals as large as wild boar.
- The Striped Hyena is nomadic, moving from watering hole to watering hole, but never straying more than 10 km from one.
- The Striped Hyena hunt in solitude but occasionally congregate in small family groups.
- While the Striped Hyena is generally not a social species, it does have some social organization.
- It forages individually and is rarely seen in groups. It lives in small family units in the den, and typically lives in the tropical savannas, grasslands, semi-deserts, scrub forests and woodlands.