Hyena Coloring Pages
Hyenas get cast as sneaky scrap-stealers in a lot of stories, but spotted hyenas actually hunt most of their own food and they're very good at it. That famous laugh isn't a joke either. It's a high whooping giggle they make when they're excited or nervous, and other hyenas can tell how old the giggler is and where it ranks in the group just from the sound.
Here's a surprise: hyenas look a lot like dogs, but they're more closely related to cats and mongooses. In a spotted hyena clan the females are bigger than the males and they're the ones in charge. Even the cubs outrank the grown-up males!
Four Kinds of Hyena
There are only four kinds of hyena in the world, and they're surprisingly different from each other. One of them barely eats meat at all!
Spotted Hyena
The spotted hyena is the biggest and the one most people picture. It lives in family groups called clans across much of Africa south of the Sahara, and a clan can have dozens of members. Spotted hyenas have one of the strongest bites of any mammal, strong enough to crack the big bones other animals leave behind. They eat the bones too, and all that calcium turns their poop white!
Striped Hyena
Striped hyenas live in North and East Africa, the Middle East and all the way across to India. They're smaller and quieter than spotted hyenas and they don't do much laughing. Most nights they wander alone looking for leftovers, fruit and insects. When a striped hyena feels threatened it puffs up the long mane on its back so it looks almost twice its size. It's a pretty good bluff for an animal that would usually rather run away.
Brown Hyena
Brown hyenas live in the deserts of southern Africa and have the longest, shaggiest coat in the family, with a pale collar of fur around the neck. Some of them patrol the beaches of Namibia looking for dead fish and seals that wash up on the sand. That's why people there call them strandwolf, which means "beach wolf."
Aardwolf
The aardwolf is the smallest hyena, and it hardly looks like it belongs in the family. It has tiny peg teeth and a long sticky tongue, and it eats termites. Lots of termites! One aardwolf can slurp up a couple of hundred thousand in a single night. Its name means "earth wolf" in Afrikaans because it sleeps in a burrow.
Hyena Fun Facts
Spotted hyena cubs are born with their eyes open and their teeth already in, which is very unusual for a baby animal. They grow up in a shared den where several mothers raise their cubs together, a bit like a hyena daycare. A hyena's whooping call can carry for kilometres across the savannah at night, and each hyena has its own voice that the rest of the clan recognises. Their front legs are longer than their back legs, which gives them that sloping back and the funny rolling way they lope along.
Hyenas and Lions
People often think hyenas just hang around waiting to steal a lion's dinner. Sometimes they do! But scientists watching them in Africa found it works both ways, and in some places lions steal more food from hyenas than hyenas steal from lions. The two have been rivals for a very long time. A big group of hyenas can chase a lone lioness off a meal, but a full-grown male lion is far too big for them to tackle, so they usually give him plenty of room.
Hyenas in Folklore
In stories from East Africa, Hyena is often the greedy one who never quite thinks things through. His clever rival is Hare, a small quick trickster who fools him again and again. In Swahili these characters are Fisi and Sungura, and kids have been laughing at poor Fisi's mistakes for generations.
Hyenas come out at night and make spooky whoops in the dark, so it's no wonder they turned up in scarier tales too. In parts of Tanzania people used to say witches rode hyenas through the night like horses.
In Europe hardly anyone had seen a real hyena, so people made things up. Old books of animals claimed a hyena could copy a human voice and call a shepherd by name to lure him outside. They said it could change from male to female, and that a magic stone in its eye would let you see the future if you held it under your tongue. None of that's true, but it makes a great story.
Werehyenas
In old stories from parts of Africa and the Middle East, some people weren’t quite what they seemed. By day they were ordinary neighbours, but after dark they slipped out of the village as hyenas and went prowling through the tall grass.
In some versions you could spot a werehyena by a wound that matched one a hyena got the night before, and in others a hyena was found wearing a person’s earrings!
The tales were a way of explaining the strange whoops and giggles that drifted in from the dark, and they still make a good shivery story to tell at bedtime.
Ice Age Hyenas
During the Ice Age a bigger cousin called the cave hyena lived right across Europe, even in England. In 1821 quarry workers in Yorkshire broke into Kirkdale Cave and found it full of old elephant, hippo and rhino bones covered in tooth marks. The cave had been a hyena den, and they'd been dragging their dinners home!
