I spotted the female walking with her tail up, which usually only means she's just pooped or is currently pooping, and sometimes means she's sexually receptive. But this female also had a bubble of amniotic sac protruding from under her tail (the squeamish should just skip the photos):
Bubble
She was very restless, walking around a lot, lying down, getting up again and walking to a new spot. She had some trouble with the territorial male, who took her extended tail as a come-on. Tommy males usually take "being female" as a come-on though, so I'm not even sure why they bother having the tail signal. Eventually she settled on a seemingly random patch of short grass near the edge of a herd of her conspecifics and lay down to labor in earnest. A couple times towards the beginning she tried to stand up as if by walking away she could cancel the whole birth thing. Sorry, mama:
If you look closely, you can see the baby's face. I DO NOT recommend this, and neither does that unfortunate female tommy. We have the same nightmares.
Shortly she accepted her fate and lay on her side, her contractions periodically lifting her legs off the ground:
After a short labor (I have the actual time recorded somewhere), the baby was born! Yay! I was excited, but to the mom it seemed as if the calf was the cereal and the placenta was the prize inside the box. She spent the next few minutes totally ignoring the wriggling new life except to rid it and the ground around it of all traces of blood, membrane, etc:
Nom nom nom
Eating the birth materials is a very adaptive behavior for tommies and other hiders. If you're going to leave your newborn hiding in a bush a half hour after it's born, best not to leave a bloody, smelly appetizer for those predators who would make lunch out of your offspring. A thorough cleaning also helps with bonding by familiarizing mom with baby's scent and stimulating the baby to move for the first time.
Here the mother performs flehmen, a hilarious facial expression made when ungulates and many other animals draw scent stimuli into their vomeronasal organ, which is a sort of "super-smeller" that lets them smell non-volatile chemicals that can't be smelled normally.
Birth materials consumed, mom now seemed to notice her new charge, which had been doing its best to stand, but had only gotten as far as crawling on its front legs and falling on its own face, often aided in this endeavor by mom's insistent grooming:
Oops
The next ten minutes or so was an adorable montage of standing attempts, which were eventually successful:
Standing was followed by the hilarity of the newborn's confusion about where exactly the nipples were located:
But he eventually got that too (albeit not gracefully):
And then, tragedy! Interrupting the adorable Bambi-esque scene of mother-infant bonding came a nefarious interloper:
The warthog hooked the newborn with a tusk and tossed it about ten feet into the air:
At the top of this photo there is a small black dot. This is a part of the calf which has just been tossed up in the air by the warthog.
Brave defense by mom
It then chased mom off, took the now-limp baby in its mouth, shook it violently a few times and then...walked away like it had not done anything strange, as if warthogs are the designated baby-shakers of the savanna and I should not be at all surprised.
But I was surprised. I had never heard of such warthog behavior. Granted, a few time this spring other researchers and I saw warthogs eating carrion and, in one case, harassing a newborn Grant's gazelle and its mother, but it seemed likely that it was just after the placenta. Warthogs are pigs after all and not above scavenging free protein when available. I would in fact have been far less shocked if the warthog actually ate the baby. But it didn't. It just roughed it up and left. Perhaps another short communication paper to come on this. Perhaps I will make my career on one-observation papers. But it was bizarre behavior that I don't really have a good explanation for.
Anyway, as I waited on the edge of my seat, the mother returned to her abused calf, sniffed it, and walked away without a second glance. Even given that walking away without a second glance is what tommy mothers do, and what I watch them do on a regular basis, I was convinced after a twenty minute wait that this mother had actually abandoned her calf. It made sense: the calf was probably injured, possibly dead, and in that case not worth any further investment. There was also the possibility that the warthog had interrupted before the crucial mother-infant bond was formed and that the mother had failed to switch on her motherly behavior.
As the mother walked further and further away, joined a distant group of females and became behaviorally indistinguishable from them, I decided to investigate. I got out of the car and found the fawn (alive) after a short search. I donned gloves and briefly inspected the fawn, feeling for broken bones and searching for puncture wounds or other obvious problems. Nothing. I returned to my car and called Kim, who happened to be in the area. Kim showed up, repeated my inspection and also found nothing. Then we fantasized for awhile about adopting a baby tommy and having a research center mascot. It would have been amazing. I decided though that the most responsible course of action would be to wait and see if the mother came back. After all, that would give the newborn it's best chance of survival. It was mid-afternoon and if she didn't come back by nightfall, we would talk to the vet to see if there was anything that could be done.
Kim left and three hours passed. I spent most of it trying to pick out the new mother from the rest of the female herd. Usually mothers are noticeable in their behavior (more vigilant) and their appearance (udders). But I could not find a female more vigilant than the others and they were too far away to spot udders. Eventually, though, a small subgroup broke off and came up the hill towards my car and the birth site. The group played it cool, lying down some 150 meters from the car. Finally, a familiar-looking female stood up and cautiously eyed me and the birth site. The give-away was a piece of afterbirth hanging from her, which I guess she passed while away and had not yet consumed:
Ever so slowly and cautiously, she moved towards the birth site, pausing every few steps to survey the surroundings (presumably for warthogs). Finally - finally - she reached the calf. She sniffed it and it popped up and everything was as if nothing had ever interrupted them. Sigh of relief. She accepted it and groomed it, and eventually moved off with it so it could pick a new hiding spot.
Once it settled in, she moved off again and began the cycle of active and hiding periods that I spend every day observing. Happy ending!
Still not giving up on alternative nipple locations, though
