The Spotted Hyena: A Study of Predation and Social Behavior.

First Edition. xvi, 335 pp; illus. Original cloth, large 8vo. Signature of former owner on front flyleaf, else Near Fine, in near fine dust jacket. Wildlife Behavior and Ecology Series. '[D]irector of the Tanganyika National Parks, John Owen . . . asked in 1963 if I could come and study 'the ecology of the carnivores' of the Serengeti. There were 24 species. At the time, I was completing my doctorate with Niko Tinbergen in Oxford, England, on predation on gulls, and there was not that much general scientific interest in the nocturnal carnivores. The reason for the National Parks' concern with predation was a management problem: politicians pressed for game-cropping, for utilization of the larger masses of migratory wildebeest and zebra by the African people. The question was, how would this affect the animals for which the tourists visited the park--the large predators? I concentrated on just one, a species that, among Africans, was the butt of many jokes; consequently, I was, too. Hyenas are thoroughly mixed up in witchcraft, hated by hunters, despised by ignorants, and subjects of terror tales for children; and I must admit to momentary doubts about what I had let myself in for when, at an early stage, I found quantities of human hair in their feces. For a long time, I found them almost impossible to study; those were days before radio-location or night-vision equipment. The animals walked over enormous distances (frequently 50 kilometers or more a night, through rough terrain), and their social organization appeared to be chaos. The breakthrough came when I temporarily left the Serengeti and studied hyenas in the much smaller Ngorongoro crater. It all fell into shape: the clan system of very large groups, discrete ranges, the clear effects of hyenas on wildebeest and zebra, the predator's response to variations in antipredator systems. With that background, one could understand the much more fluid populations in the Serengeti, a quite different social system and ecology in response to the migratory prey. This was many years before 'behavioral ecology'; most mammalogists still thought in terms of simple territorial social organizations, of animals with species-specific behaior patterns, with intraspecific variation just a noise in the system and rather a nuisance. The initial observations met with some skepticism; for instance, it took years before it was generally accepted that, in some areas, hyenas are the predators, lions merely the scavengers that come after. The research was done a quarter of a century ago; how much of it still stands? Studies on the behavior of hyenas have continued, doing much of what I should have done in the first place, disproving or confirming. Within the clan system, a sex-linked dominance order has been found, almost a class system, in which dominance appears to be passed on from mother to daughter. The role of hyenas as predators in populations of large herbivores has been confirmed in the Kalahari, and comparison among hyena social organizations in different ecosystems uses the enormous intraspecific flexibility to study effects of ecology on social structures and on the evolution of sociality in different hyenids. The old Serengeti data still serve as reference points' (This Week's Citation Classic, Current Contents, No. 18, May 6, 1991, p. 10). Kruuk has won acclaim for his Niko's Nature: The Life of Niko Tinbergen and his Science of Animal Behavior (Oxford, 2003). 'Great men deserve great biographies not sycophantic hagiographies, and Hans Kruuk has done the Maestro proud, as he is uniquely qualified to do. I started reading and couldn't stop' (Richard Dawkins). …