Through the cameras we started seeing some interesting dispersal dynamics between Kalahari and Sahara and, then, from other dispersing dogs. The dispersal process doesn’t seem to be as simple as a group of same sex dogs leave a pack, meet a group of the opposite sex, and form a new pack. There seems to be more to it than that, an element of choice. Through the camera traps, we observed Kalahari and Sahara meeting up with a dispersing male,Ginkgo, from the distant Mma Barbie pack, a male who we know dispersed with two brothers, briefly joined up with our two females by himself, left them and then joined up with another brother who dispersed from his natal pack alone a few weeks later. Without our camera traps, all we would have known about Ginkgo was that he left his pack with two brothers, and a few weeks later the fourth brother left alone. That’s it. It’s a complicated process, and one that we know very little about, mainly due to the difficulty of following dispersing dogs. Our camera traps are helping to fill in the blanks. There’s no telling why potential packs don’t last, but sometimes they don’t. The time that these two sisters spent running around by themselves also couldn’t last; they had to find males. Dogs form packs, it’s what they do. It’s how they reproduce, it’s how they survive. Kalahari and Sahara needed to do the same.

Sadly, the end of the sister’s solo time came to an unhappy ending, when Kalahari died. We don’t know how she died, but we know when with a high degree of certainty thanks to the camera traps. On the cameras, we can see that she was with Sahara on the 8th October 2019 at 12:25. By 4:30am on the same morning, Sahara was alone, seen on a different camera trap. We recovered Kalahari’s collar on the 10th. We don’t know exactly what happened to her, as her body was too deteriorated to draw conclusions when we found it. The death of the collared dog, usually results in the end of our ability to monitor the surviving individuals. Finding a single dispersing dog is almost impossible. They don’t have a fixed home range in which to focus your search efforts, they can go anywhere, and it’s very easy to overlook or lose the spoor of a single dog. But with the camera traps and her regular visits to the SMS’s we have been able to continue to monitor Sahara.

While this was going on with Kalahari and Sahara, Danakil pack had some changes of their own. Around April 2019 Easter,an unknown female (which is rare in our study population), joined the pack as a subdominant female. Then in July, heavily pregnant Ripley died of unknown causes. Sometime in September, three dispersing females from Mma Barbie pack joined Easter (Ash, Aspen and Birch,). These 7 dogs ran around together for a few months, and, just as we thought they were looking like a stable new pack,the three males vanished. There were no collars on Katavi, Virunga or Odysseus,so we had no idea where they had gone. The four females have remained together,again a group of available adult females trying to find suitable males.

Back with Sahara, the camera traps showed us she was alone initially, as she continued to visit the marking sites. A month after Kalahari’s death, in early November, Sahara appeared with new dogs!Males! Even more excitingly, with the males were Katavi, Virunga and Odysseus! She was back with her former Beanie pack mates, minus both her sisters, Gobi and Kalahari. We called this pack Newbie pack (“new-beanie”). This new and uncollared pack were monitored primarily by their visits to the camera trap sites, and in early December, another pack change membership shake-up occurred: Odysseus and Virunga joined the four available females from Mma Barbie, plus Easter. These are now technically yet another new pack we call the Spring pack. Katavi and Sahara are still together, later confirmed by the camera traps. After 4years and 4 packs, Sahara is finally dominant with a male she had previously mated with, but when she was subdominant to her sister Gobi. Only time will tell ifthese two will have more luck than they did in 2018.