The Honey Badger Around the Corner
on Jul 04, 2023The Big 5 is always on every visitor’s lips and without any doubt adding the cheetah and wild dog, creates the “Magnificent Seven”. But the bush is always full of surprises and most of the time the unexpected happens. Finding smaller and elusive animals like the Honey Badger is always a bonus to any safari.
On a quiet afternoon safari, we had to pull out all the stops for our photographic guests who enjoyed photographing birds and cats. We had no other option than just to enjoy the drive and watch as the bush would unfold in front of us. Here and there we would have a bird flying over watering holes, but unfortunately, none would sit still long enough for good photographic opportunities.
Our aim was to find leopard tracks to follow but our luck quickly changed as we were about to drive past a rhino midden. Our focus shifted from the road as our tracker yelled with excitement in his voice, calling out the honey badger he had just seen. At first, I could not believe how close it was to our vehicle as they normally run away when they hear an approaching vehicle. Without saying a word everyone took out their cameras and started photographing it in a hurry before it disappears, but luckily for us, the honey badger had a few surprises in store for us.
The Latin name for honey badger is Mellivora capensis which means “Honey eater of the Cape”. As the name indicates, they love eating honey among other things like insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, and eggs, as well as roots, bulbs, berries, and fruit. Honey badgers have a very good relationship with birds known as Honeyguides, or Honey Birds. Honey badgers will cleverly follow the calls of the Honeyguide to find beehives, when the badger arrives, they will break the beehive open and feast on the honey and leave a reward for the bird that helped them find the hive. It is not only the honey that they enjoy eating from the beehive but also the larvae of the bees.
We quickly realised that the honey badger was doing something similar to when they get bee larvae out of a beehive. The badger was in the middle of a rhino midden, digging around for any dung beetle larvae that it could find. As it dug deeper into the dung pile, we could only see its tail occasionally before coming back up again with a big white beetle larvae in its mouth. Their long claws aid them to dig through the dung quickly and easily. Moving from one side of the midden to the other, no piece of dung was left unturned. Dung beetle larvae have a lot of nutrition in them, and honey badgers will feed on them whenever they are available.
Honey badgers are solitary animals and spend most of the season alone. They will join up with the opposite gender during mating season and can stay with that partner for about a month before going on their own path again. Despite their solitary lifestyle, the youngsters will stay with their mothers for longer periods of time. There is no definitive age at which they will leave their mother’s side.
Spending more than two hours with a Honey badger was something very unexpected for us, and we considered ourselves very lucky. It provided a lot of amusement and great photo opportunities for us as it would fling dung around to get to the larvae.
Blog by Ronald Mutero (Selati Camp Ranger)
