Brown Hyena hunting Aardvark in the Kruger

The Kruger national park is one of the best places to watch wild animals. Indeed on this site I have around 10 destinations spread throughout the Kruger and greater Limpopo national parks (with more coming when the epidemic is ended).

It is a huge park, and some people can be pretty dismissive – indeed I have heard people call it the disney national park. This is down to the ease of doing safari here, with well kept roads and rest stops through out the park with electric fences (meaning you do not have to pay for a night guard as is necessary in some other parks). However, the park is huge, being the size of Wales – a small country in its own right.

It has big populations of all the big 5 and even has populations of cheetah and wild dog, that number in the hundreds.

Why is a big park good? Because it means animals can find space away from the lions and therefore you get a wider range of animals than in a small reserve.

Aardvark are animals which generally make their presence known, but are rarely seen. They are incredible diggers, and so you see their holes all over the place. They will tend to have several significant burrows allowing them to run into one if threatened. These burrows are also used by as many as 30 other mammals at different times. The Aardvark however is almost exclusively nocturnal, and a sighting during daylight is extremely rare.

Brown Hyenas are rather different to their spotted cousins, and are therefore easy to differentiate. They have a brown shaggy coat rather than short spotty. There are only thought to be between 4,000 and 10,000 left in the wild. They are particularly well suited to semi desert areas, and often live outside protected areas. Indeed in the Kruger they are pretty rare, and sightings are not common (with a number of discussion forums on the internet whether they are indeed present.

Therefore to film an interaction between these two rarely seen species is lucky indeed.