Dr. Hoof Stock

While Jane was at the C2S2 meeting, she was able to make a few opportunistic observations….

We collected some anecdotal observations on waterbuck and videos of deer rutting vocalizations….

The highlight today was watching Crooked Tail interact with a young male and calf….with a group of five north of the Lodge in the cleared juniper area….more later

This is our last observation scheduled on the protocol for Renee’s graduate research!  My highlight was watching the courtship interactions between Lucifer (M530B) and F63Y.  When he stopped mounting her, she mounted him!

When I first located Lucifer, he was off the road between the Addax shed and Turtle Pond.  He was grazing on a patch of green grass across from where the juniper has been cleared.  He then walked toward the Safari Camp and I picked him up again on the Juniper Loop.

F63Y found Lucifer and approached him.  He courted her intensively, including foreleg lift, horn taps, following and mounting.  When his interest waned, she reciprocated with foreleg lift, horn(less) taps, following and mounting.  The video is in sequential 6-min focals, about 24-30 minutes total.

The pair moved toward a group of 10 female waterbuck on the main meadow near the clinic.  Although the other females moved on, Lucifer and F63Y remained grazing.

The next morning, I found the females and Lucifer in the same location before daylight.  The other females moved to the Juniper Loop at daybreak.  Lucifer followed them, as they entered the woods south of Safari Camp.  I did not locate him for the rest of the day.

Renee will fill in more details about what was observed….

The highlight was a tremendous thunderstorm Saturday afternoon with rainbows in the evening!  During the storm, the waterbuck huddled under trees. When the rain slowed down, they grazed, occasionally shaking water droplets off their heads.

At noon on Saturday, Lucifer (M530B) was on the Juniper Loop and walked into the woods by the NW shed.  By 1530, he was between the Lodge and the creek, in the general area of females (total of 14).  He remained in that general area until he crossed over to the Juniper Loop on Sunday morning (by 9 am).  No food was delivered while I was watching on Sunday.  He drank from the rain water in the pellet troughs and he grazed with other species (mostly sable) on the pasture east of Juniper Loop.  No females appeared on Juniper Loop.

Lucifer checked out a few females very briefly and did not persist  in following them.  He briefly escalated with an addax, who de-escalated.  He watched addax.  He was not following the female that gave birth on 7/28.  She was still bagged up.

Although M664O was with the rest of the group prior to the rainstorm, he was with the male calf and a female SW of the Lodge Road (by the Creek) Saturday evening and Sunday morning.  I saw no interactions between Lucifer and the young males (M664O is a yearling with horns about 6-10 inches, and M91′F61 was born in 4/09 so is about 3-4 months with horn buds 2-3 inches).

This is the day that the males were switched….Renee will fill in the details later

Sat, 7/11/09

A grey fox crossed the road on my way in this morning, at daybreak!

Shortly after daybreak, the waterbuck females gathered on the Juniper Loop, then crossed over to Turtle Pond.  They drank and grazed near the pond.  It is very low, yet there is green vegetation around it.  I noted this because I have never seen the waterbuck at that pond.  The Gemsbock, Addax and fallow deer each separately also gathered there later in the day.  The female waterbuck passed on over to the meadow south of the creek, where they grazed near the northeast shed.  Later in the day they split into two groups, both on the lodge side of the creek (see details below).  One group was southwest of the road to the lodge (SW group), and moved parallel to the road near dusk.  The other group was northeast of the swimming pool (NE group) and moved northeast.

Lucifer (M530B) spent the morning near the food troughs on the Juniper Loop, disappeared around 1 pm  and by evening was grazing near the NE group of females. He was clearly not herding them, merely moving slowly in their direction while grazing.  When the females moved out of view, he approached the two who were remaining (FNT & M91).  After interacting with M91 (see below) Lucifer did not follow these two and drifted over in the direction of the other group when I left at dark.

In the morning, the youngest (4-mo) male calf (M91) nursed from Slit-ear (F61Y).  Although he suckled for only 3 minutes, the interaction continued for 6 minutes (videoed).  He bumped her udder repeatedly and she darted away from him, using much the same quality of movement as when a female is evading a courting male.  However, she kept standing for him and he kept trying to gain access.  Finally she walked away.  He held his head low near her udder, in a similar stance to the way Toby (C-male) used to approach Lucifer (V-male).

At the end of the day Slit-ear’s calf (M91) was separated from his mother, she was in the southwest group of females and he was following an untagged female initially in the northeast group.  The two of them (M91 & FNT) were separated from the NE group when they were grazing and did not notice the other females move off.  The southwestern group included the juvenile male (M664O), F58Y, F6?Y, F63Y, F61Y(Slit-ear),  F549R and 3 untagged females.  I watched an untagged female followed by F59Y  moving in their direction on the other side of the creek.  The northeastern group included F64Y (backwards tag), juvenile F672Y, F545B, calf M91, and 5 FNT (9 total).  Total count was 9 + 9 + 2 + Lucifer = 21 waterbuck.

M91 interacted briefly with Lucifer, approaching him with horizontal neck and head tossing repeatedly.  Lucifer reached out to M91 as if to sniff his side, and the calf side-stepped quickly, as if nervous.  After a slight horn dip from Lucifer, the calf circled behind Lucifer and sniffed his rear.  Then both moved on as if ignoring each other.

Lucifer did not move with the females at all during the morning or midday.  He was grazing north of Safari Camp, and moving toward Juniper Loop.  I took one video sample before losing him.  When I finally picked him up again, he was resting north of the Cut-through shed on Juniper Loop.  Several times, he stood or moved away from approaching gemsbock.  He licked an empty trough and moved over to the edge of the woods where he could see the feed truck approach.  He was able to feed at two troughs, in between displacements.  In the context of food pellets, he stands up to addax, but de-escalates with Gemsbok and completely avoids Sable.  He may tolerate one fallow buck at the trough, but avoids several.  In the evening, he displaced Addax twice, near the Lodge, not in the context of pellets.  He approached the Addax directly, no horn contact, the Addax moved away.

Sun 7/12/09

At daybreak, I drove into the retirement pasture and parked near the troughs.  At first only 2 sable were visible grazing in the middle of the pasture.  Over the next hour, I observed the following:  4 addra, 2 vicuna (+ 1 lama?), 2 zebra (Hardeman’s), 3 fallow deer, 2 wildebeest, 1 red deer (F159R), 2 M white-tail, M664Y +3 scimitar-horned oryx, 2 arabian oryx, 3 addax + M575G (speckled grey).

Crooked tail (M624Y) appeared in the last 8 minutes, grazing alone near the gate.  As a yearling, his horns are now about 12 inches long.   The intact male waterbuck (M42O), was in a separate enclosure

—Jane

Aleyda did the focal observations on Douglas, M42Y, and our class did two point-transect surveys of all ungulates in the main pasture.  We all observed Douglas (42 yellow) chase Toby (55 yellow) toward the Safari Camp Tank.

Toby submerged in the water so that only his head was visible.  Douglas crossed onto the island in the tank and stood on the bank staring at Toby.  Aleyda recorded the interactions on video.  She reported that when Toby started to emerge, Douglas displayed with a head dip and Toby retreated into the water.  After Douglas left, Toby remained submerged for at least 30 min. before he emerged from the water.

Aleyda will add comments to this post to elaborate on her observations in more detail.  Aleyda reported earlier she had observed a group of females by the creek near the lodge.  Later she observed Toby on the Turtle Pond road.

During our point transect surveys, we did not observe any other waterbuck.  The deer were feeding on the large pasture at sunrise, then moved into the shadows until the visitors arrived with pellets. We noticed about 6 fallow deer bucks overweight, feeding from cars near the cattle guard from the Buffer Pasture.  The sable were in a close group, in the shade near the feed troughs on the cut-through road.  Later in the day, they had moved to the entrance from the Buffer pasture.  Half were lying in the shade of a tree, half were grazing and nibbling pellets from cars.  The addax were in the shade of the Juniper loop at daybreak, then a group separated, grazed in the meadow north of Safari Camp pond and crossed over the hill to the pasture south of the creek near the lodge.  They were in the sun, when other species moved into the shade.  Six gemsbock were scattered in the shade on the Juniper loop near the empty feed troughs.  At 3 pm they had joined 6 more gemsbock and moved to grazing in the sun in the pasture north of the clinic.

We talked about testing the behavioral ecology model:  resources influence distribution of females, the distribution of females influences the distribution of males.  We recorded the variation in resources at each point in our survey transect.  We brainstormed about what might be some of the factors influencing the distribution of each of these species to be so different in the same environment:

• physical adaptations to thermal stress (changes with the daily heat cycle):  light addax (high threshold), light/dark gemsbock, dark sable (low threshold)
• physical adaptations to water stress (changes with the seasonal rainfall cycles and anomalies like El Nino)  may mirror the gradient of species adaptations to thermal stress, but not exactly the same; need to look at interaction of thermal and water stress
• activity cycles:  a before-sunrise feeding bout may be followed by a bout of ruminating; the nocturnal feeding may vary between species
• bonds between females:  the sable females were in a tight group with 5-6 calves close to each other; the addax calves, females and males were all over the place; we did not see the group of gemsbock with calves; the deer females and fawns seemed to be separated from the male deer, although the foraging at cars brought them in close proximity; male deer escalated with frontal kicks in the context of high quality food resources (pellets from our van)
• food resources available: annual forbs & grasses were dried up in well drained sites, still present in moister sites;    perennial grasses were still green; those that were stimulated by grazing more so than others; inedible increaser species (forbs) were taller than perenial grasses on some patches
• water resources:  the sites that were further from water were least likely to be occupied
• an unknown is how often each species drinks during the day and their flight tolerance to predators hiding at waterholes; a continuous monitor at waterholes could help answer this question; are the forest species more or less likely to use waterholes in the forest?
• availability of the high quality food resources varied throughout the day, with the visitor traffic and the feed truck
• same-sex rivalry:  species that evolved in environments with more continuously available predictable food resources were the ones where one male could exclude another from resources (i.e food & females: waterbuck, sable); those that evolved in environments with ephemeral unpredictable patches of food were the ones where females and males moved together and they moved longer distances (e.g. addax, gemsbock)
• species with predictable food supplies did not store body fat (e.g. waterbuck) and species with aseasonally unpredictable (e.g. addax) or seasonally predictable food shortages stored body fat (e.g. fallow deer)
• appetites of the fat male deer seemed insatiable (no “stop eating” rules under conditions where food is limited); those that went into rut in good body condition would be more likely to survive a long period without feeding better than those that went into rut in low body condition
• intermediate species (i.e. gemsbock) seemed to be influenced by learning where and when to exploit the ephemeral resources (i.e. pellets from the feed truck)
• bigger bodied species seemed more likely to displace smaller bodied species at pellets (gemsbock over deer?)
• flightiness in response to “predator” stimuli in the woods; the addax were the least flighty, the waterbuck the most; in the forest environment, predators more likely to sneak up on females and calves without detection, compared to female and calf addax in more open environments where predators can be seen from a longer distance

Aleyda did the observations this weekend.   More details to follow.