Anecdotes about the honey badger
(writing in progress)
I learned the following things about the honey badger on my Kruger Park visit of June 2012.
The honey badger is common enough in the Kruger Park, despite the fact that other mainly invertebrate-eating mammals, e.g. aardvark, aardwolf, and pangolin, are scarce and only patchily distributed in Kruger Park. In the Malelane Mountain Bushveld, I got the impression that the honey badger is as common as it is anywhere in its extensive range in Africa and India. The trails rangers at Bushmans camp told me that they see the honey badger quite frequently on their drives and walks, and watched one specimen actually climb a rocky slope after being disturbed at its base. Indeed I myself saw one specimen foraging in dung on the dirt road in broad daylight at 8 am on a sunny day.
So, in my 11 days in Kruger Park, I did not spot leopard, cheetah, or hunting dog, but I did spot honey badger and in fact got the best view of it in the wild that I've ever had, all my life. It seems that the abundance of rhino dung in particular promotes the honey badger in Malelane Mountain Bushveld, via dung beetle larvae, which are a favourite food. This implies that the square-lipped rhino in a sense promotes/facilitates the honey badger. An implication of this is that the honey badger may perhaps be more common today in Malelane Mountain Bushveld than it has ever been before, or ever will be again (because the population densities of megaherbivores in this area could hardly be greater than they are currently).
OI was told my fellow-participants on the Bushman trail that honey badgers raid the rest camp at Satara. I was told by an Honourary Ranger that a 'pair' of honey badgers habitually raids the camping site at Berg en Dal rest camp. I was told by my fellow-participants on the Metsimetsi trail that honey badgers raid the rest camp camping site at Halali in Etosha National Park in Namibia. While myself camping at Skukuza rest camp on 16 June 2012, I foolishly left out a 4 litre plastic tub, or stout construction, full of amasi (curdled milk), overnight right beside my tent. In the morning the entire container had been removed and I never found it. All that remained was the mangled plastic screwtop and a few splashes of amasi on a nearby road. This container seemed too large (several kg mass) to have been taken or opened by any mongoose or genet or galago, so I suspect it was taken by a honey badger. However, an alternative possibility is a jackal.
Lee Gutteridge, in his book The South African Bushveld: a Field Guide from the Waterberg, 2008, Southbound, Jo'burg, states that the honey badger is 'extremely common' in the Waterberg. He says that Eugene Marais, also in the 'western Transvaal', experimented by injecting honey badgers with black mamba venom, and found that the honey badger always woke up after a period of unconsciousness (much as we have seen in the video clip from the Kalahari, in which one of Keith Begg's honey badgers was bitten by a puffadder). So there seem to have been 'hard data' w.r.t. the venom-resistance of the honey badger to Africa's most feared snake for at least a century.
To expand on the honey badgers raiding the camping site at Halali, Etosha, where the black-backed jackal too was habituated and actually jumped up on the picnic tables: my informant, a Swiss 40-year old called Andy, speaking from his own experience a few weeks earlier, told me that the honey badgers there are in the habit of raiding the camp rubbish bins. Measures have been taken to prevent this, by taped the bins to trees, about 1 m off the ground. The honey badgers nonetheless, while Andy was watching, managed to scramble high enough up the trunks to jump clumsily into the bins, with only their rear ends showing, thus tearing the taping apart and the whole bin plus badger crashing to the ground. The honey badgers approached Andy and his party closely, not waiting until the site was vacant of humans. Andy had the impression of both short-sightedness and rather poor sense of smell, despite the reputation of the honey badger for acute olfaction. Andy experimented by throwing fatty bones to these honey badgers at Halali, being able to compare the response with previous similar offers to domestic cats in African camp sites. He found that the honey badger was not able easily to locate the bones, as if both short-sighted and poorer in olfactory ability than a domestic cat.
(writing in progress)
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