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The Painted Wolves of Zululand
Text and photos by Micaela Szykman
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It's 4 a.m. and dawn is breaking on a summer's day in South Africa. As the sun rises over Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, I watch a pack of African wild dogs awaken and begin their elaborate morning ritual. A few dogs greet each other, running side by side in submissive postures with their ears back, heads down, and bodies crouched. They lick each other's mouths and express their excitement with remarkably undoglike twitters, chitters, and whines. Other pack members join in, and even adults engage in playful behavior. Soon, the whole Hluhluwe Pack is up and running around.

African wild dog
African wild dogs have long been persecuted by humans, but the National Zoo is working to reintroduce the species in South Africa.

Sometimes I drive an hour over rough and winding park roads to catch these important morning activities, which many scientists believe hold the pack together by reinforcing social bonds and fostering cooperation between members. If the dogs are at their den, I know where to find them. If not, I locate them with the help of signals from radiocollars worn by one or two pack members. But the effort is worth it and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to watch these fascinating animals play, hunt, feed, and rest.

African wild dogs are as beautiful as their scientific name—Lycaon pictus, which means "painted wolf" in Latin—suggests. Their coats are a stunning patchwork of white, yellow-brown, and black fur. They are lean and tall compared to coyotes, standing up to 30 inches high at the shoulder and weighing between 40 and 60 pounds, with outsize, saucer-shaped ears.

Their common name can be misleading, however. For some, the term "wild dog" implies a gang of runaway domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) that roam around in a menacing pack. But African wild dogs are only remotely related to domestic dogs, and have never been domesticated. Wild members of the canid family that are called "wild dogs" live on every continent except Antarctica: African wild dogs in Africa, wolves (Canis lupus) in North America and Europe, bush dogs (Speothos venaticus) in South America, dholes (Cuon alpinus) in Asia, and dingoes (Canis lupus dingo) in Australia.

African wild dog populations began a decline a century ago that has accelerated over the last 30 years. Habitat fragmentation, persecution and hunting by humans, diminishing prey populations, and diseases transmitted by domestic dogs, including rabies, distemper, and parvo virus, are the main causes of the decline. Competition with other carnivores such as lions (Panthera leo) and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) and collisions with vehicles also diminish wild dog numbers. Although they formerly ranged across sub-Saharan Africa, African wild dogs have disappeared from 25 of the 39 countries they once occupied, and survive only in scattered populations, mostly in eastern and southern Africa. Fewer than 5,000 individuals remain on the continent, which makes them far rarer than several high-profile endangered species. By contrast, between 9,000 and 12,000 cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) and between 100,000 and 130,000 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) live in the wild in Africa.

Wild dogs are among the most challenging carnivores to conserve, but it is not too late to prevent their extinction. I arrived in South Africa in 2003 to coordinate the African Wild Dog Reintroduction and Conservation Program, a science-based project initiated by the Smithsonian's National Zoo in partnership with other American and South African research institutions. Our work will contribute to the efficient design and implementation of future wild dog reintroductions and, we hope, the survival of the species.

Losing and Regaining Ground
African wild dogs' population decline began in the early 1900s, when misconceptions about the species bred widespread fear and hatred of the dogs. For much of the 20th century, some wildlife managers considered the dogs savage killers that threatened the survival of other species, and shot them on sight, as did farmers and ranchers who believed the dogs took their livestock. Although African wild dogs do occasionally prey on livestock, they prefer wild prey such as impala (Aepyceros melampus) when it is available. Wild dogs catch a variety of prey species ranging from small animals such as lizards or hares to large mammals such as blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus).

Field studies in the 1970s gave scientists a better understanding of wild dog ecology, behavior, and population decline, and by the 1980s, the species was legally protected in six countries. One of these was South Africa, where the only viable population of wild dogs lived in Kruger National Park in the northeast. Attempts were made in the 1980s to reintroduce wild dogs to the KwaZulu-Natal province south of Kruger, where wild dogs had not been seen since before the 1920s. But these reintroductions were only moderately successful because the captive-bred dogs struggled to learn how to hunt for themselves and evade predators such as lions.

African wild dog
Southern Africa may be the best place for African wild dog reintroductions.

In 1997, recognizing the need for action to prevent wild dogs' extinction, members of the Canid Specialist Group—a subgroup of the World Conservation Union's Species Survival Commission—conducted a Population and Habitat Viability Assessment for African Wild Dogs, and subsequently published the African Wild Dog Status Survey and Action Plan. The group found that the wild dogs' future looked grim, even within park boundaries. "Over half the wild dogs found dead in protected areas have been shot, snared, poisoned, killed by road traffic, or infected with diseases by domestic dogs outside the reserve," according to the plan, which also identified habitat fragmentation as a leading cause of wild dog population declines.

Despite the many threats that African wild dogs face, the plan aimed to protect and even enlarge existing wildlife areas that support wild dog populations, as well as to re-establish populations that had been extirpated from protected areas. It also identified southern Africa as the place that "holds wild dogs' best hope for the future."

Kruger National Park has a viable population of between 150 and 250 wild dogs, and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal was identified as a suitable area to establish a second substantial population in South Africa. Following the minor success of the 1980s reintroductions, more recent reintroductions in 1997, 2001, 2002, and 2003, along with natural pack formations within the reserve in the past year, have substantially increased Hluhluwe-iMfolozi's wild dog population to more than 45 adults and yearlings and many new pups born in 2005. There is currently a record-breaking number of five breeding packs in the park, including the Hluhluwe Pack that I watch on early summer mornings.

A Close-knit Family
Working in KwaZulu-Natal, I see first-hand the challenges of conserving African wild dogs.

Because pack members cooperatively hunt, raise pups, and defend themselves against predators in order to survive, we must maintain large populations containing several intact packs and give dispersing dogs opportunities to create new packs. And wild dogs require vast areas of habitat: Packs may range up to 350 square miles if they have no pups younger than three months old. But as humans carve that habitat into smaller and more scattered fragments, packs and dispersing dogs are becoming more isolated from one another and are at greater risk of exposure to intolerant farmers, collisions with vehicles, and domestic dogs.

The Hluhluwe Pack's morning ritual reveals the intensely social nature of African wild dogs. Packs constantly reinforce social bonds through friendly interactions and play, and move as a single, cohesive unit, hunting, feeding, playing, resting, and even raising pups together. Most packs are led by a dominant, or "alpha," female that is the mother of all the pups and a dominant male that fathers most, if not all, of the pups. But every pack member, including yearlings, helps care for the alpha pair's offspring. When the pack goes out to hunt, the dominant female or a babysitter female stays behind with pups younger than three months old to protect them from predators. After the pack has hunted and fed, it returns to the den, where the adults regurgitate a helping of partially digested food from the morning's kill for the pups. This communal social system is called cooperative breeding, and it enables wild dogs to have relatively large litters: on average, they give birth to eight or nine pups and may have litters as large as 20 pups.

African wild dog pups
African wild dogs cooperate when hunting and raising pups, and live in packs with an alpha pair.

Although some packs are formed by a lone pair, most are composed of between ten and 30 adults and yearlings, and studies indicate that packs with fewer than four adults experience greater pup mortality than packs with more than four adults. Fortunately, the Hluhluwe Pack is beating the odds. It formed in 2000 when Jane, the only member of the original Hluhluwe Pack that had not died or dispersed, chose as her mate Don Juan, a dog introduced from Kruger National Park to add some fresh genes to the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park population. They successfully raised their first litter, six pups born in 2001, without any help from other related adults or offspring from previous years' litters. Despite their advancing age—Jane is eight years old and Don Juan nine—this alpha pair has raised 22 pups to adulthood, and is still going strong, raising seven pups in its fifth litter as this article goes to press.

Two pups from Jane and Don Juan's first litter, Silver and his sister Perfect, were already fully grown adults and proficient hunters when I arrived in South Africa. Unlike lions, which violently kick out adolescent males from their pride, African wild dogs never force their offspring to leave their natal pack. But Silver and Perfect had no opportunities to breed within their family group, so they struck out on their own.

Wild dogs leave their natal packs in small, same-sex groups at adolescence, and attempt to join groups of the opposite sex to form new packs. So I was not surprised when one day in September 2003, Silver and his two brothers left the Hluhluwe Pack, presumably in search of prospective mates. A few days later, Perfect and three of her sisters—two littermates and one younger sister from a 2002 litter—left the pack and were subsequently joined by three more of their sisters from the 2002 litter. Thus they were seven sisters traveling together, and the group was called the Pleiades Sisters, after the famous seven sisters of Greek mythology.

With the help of my Zulu research assistant, Sboniso Blessing (Zama) Zwane, and a South African graduate student named Jan Graf, I tracked Silver's group and the Pleiades Sisters throughout the next year, using signals from their radiocollars or reported sightings from local community members to keep up with them as they dispersed far and wide. In the first few months, the Pleiades Sisters stayed close to Jane and Don Juan's pack, but Silver and his brothers left the confines of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park very quickly. His group traveled more than 60 miles north of the park, and was sighted all over private game farms and reserves. One day, the manager of a private game farm welcomed us onto his property to look for Silver's crew. When we caught up with Silver and one of his brothers, we found them running out of a thicket with a huge African bull elephant in hot pursuit. Luckily for them, there were no lions on the property, but this bull elephant was much larger than a lion and so hot-tempered that the brothers beat a hasty retreat.

Over time, Silver's two brothers disappeared (we suspect that they died) and only Silver remained. We later found him on a reserve in the uMkhuze section of the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park, about 50 miles from his natal pack's territory, with a pair of dogs that were not his brothers. Much to our amazement, his companions were Perfect and his other sister Snow, wild dogs we hadn't seen since they left Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park as part of the Pleiades Sisters more than six months previously. The younger Pleiades Sisters were spotted in a provincial game reserve about 50 miles from Hluhluwe-iMfolozi's southwestern border. After a year of searching for mates, Silver, Perfect, and their siblings could not find any other wild dogs that were also dispersing from their natal packs.

The National Zoo's Role in Wild Dog Conservation
As coordinator of the National Zoo's African Wild Dog Reintroduction and Conservation Program, I work with South African and American colleagues, including Steven Monfort and David Wildt, scientists in the Department of Reproductive Sciences at the Zoo's Conservation and Research Center, to study the behavior and physiology of African wild dogs. The data we collect help us maintain existing wild dog packs and improve reintroduction methods so that we can ultimately establish a large, self-sustaining population of wild dogs in KwaZulu-Natal.

Much of our data come from an unlikely source—wild dog scat. National Zoo scientists pioneered a technique to extract and analyze hormones from the fecal samples of many wildlife species. It's a particularly interesting and appropriate technique for studying stress in free-ranging African wild dogs. Collecting fecal samples from individual dogs is relatively easy and non-invasive, and the dogs' stress hormones tell us a great deal about their overall health and coping abilities.

Excessive stress can increase wild dogs' vulnerability to disease and reduce their reproductive success. Fecal hormone analysis enables us to measure the dogs' stress levels before and after major events such as reintroduction, dispersal from a natal pack, or translocation of individual dogs to new sites. It also helps us understand how ecological factors such as competition with larger predators or human activities such as farming and development affect the dogs physiologically.

Micaela Szykman with African wild dogs
The author places radiocollars on tranquilized African wild dogs.

To date, my research team and I have collected more than 400 samples from 40 individuals in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, and are currently in the process of analyzing those samples for stress and reproductive hormones. In 2005, we added three new sites to our study—the Venetia-Limpopo Game Reserve, the Marakele National Park, and the uMkhuze section of the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park—where my collaborators, assistants, and I have already collected more than 100 fecal samples at each site from dozens of known individuals. Preliminary data suggest that there are differences in stress levels between dominant individuals and their offspring during the breeding and non-breeding seasons.

The next step in KwaZulu-Natal involves expanding populations of wild dogs to additional protected areas, reintroducing new packs onto provincial and privately owned reserves, and ensuring safe passage for dispersing dogs like Silver and Perfect moving between protected areas. I am proud to say that our conservation and research program is already working toward this goal. In December 2004, we participated in the reintroduction of 13 wild dogs—five from the Madikwe Game Reserve in northwestern South Africa and eight from the Marakele National Park in northeastern South Africa—to the uMkhuze section of the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park, a World Heritage site about 30 miles from Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park. For their first five months in uMkhuze, the dogs lived in a holding enclosure so they could form a stable pack before they were released. During that time, one of our program's South African research assistants, Janet Edwards, observed the dogs' behavior from the beginnings of their social bonding up until they were released in May 2005. Dubbed the Mkhuze Pack, this group produced its first litter of pups in September 2005. We hope that dispersing members of the Mkhuze Pack will one day join dispersing members of packs originating from Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park to create new packs that will inhabit additional protected areas in KwaZulu-Natal. It has been very rewarding for me to be a part of this African wild dog reintroduction and expansion conservation program.

As we conduct behavioral and physiological research, we are also helping to build scientific capacity in South Africa through the direct involvement of local graduate and undergraduate students, as well as local Zulu research assistants. What's more, we have initiated education and outreach programs to teach local community members, farmers, and tourists that African wild dogs are endangered and need our protection, and that they are not vicious livestock killers but instead are skilled hunters that select weak prey and keep resident game populations healthy. Changing attitudes and increasing cooperation between conservation scientists, private landowners, and wildlife managers are already enabling wild dogs to naturally recolonize areas from which they have long been absent.

I thoroughly enjoy working with these captivating animals, and believe I'm making a real difference. The more we understand African wild dogs' behavior, physiology, and ecology, the better our reintroduction and conservation programs will be, not just for African wild dogs, but for endangered carnivores in general. In fact, African wild dogs serve as ambassadors for a far greater effort—the large-scale conservation of Africa's land and animals, so that many species will survive in an increasingly threatened landscape.


—Micaela Szykman is a research associate at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center, and coordinator of the African Wild Dog Reintroduction and Conservation Program. To support this project, please email us.

ZooGoer 35(2) 2006. Copyright 2006 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.

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