The primate pushes its knees against its mother’s stomach. Its eyes closed, it navigates by primordial attraction, slowly nudging and twisting its way to its first contact with its mother’s breast. Like all primate mothers, the memory of seeing my son make his first expedition across my body has a crystalline quality against my foggy recollections of labor and childbirth. There’s a reason these first sightings are so memorable, iconic in nature documentaries and explorers’ memoirs. I think it is because we are aware that we don’t really know what we are seeing. We are watching the photograph develop in the dark room, faithful that a picture will emerge, but are only able to watch and wait while wrapped in mystery and darkness.
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About eight years before becoming a mother myself, I spend my days observing spotted hyena mothers in Kenya. My PhD research focuses on the development of spotted hyena cubs, and how cubs’ mothers and environments shape them. Most people think of hyenas as the cackling villains from the Lion King; in fact, they show some of the most extensive maternal care of any carnivore. They are both ferocious and tender, using their powerful mouths to crush bones, but also to nuzzle, carry, and cajole newborn cubs.
On a typical morning, I park our Land Cruiser at the hyena den, where cubs spend their time while their mothers hunt or do other things in the larger territory. Moms typically visit the den to nurse and socialize twice each day. This morning, individuals come and go, with anywhere from two to ten mothers present at any one time. Social interactions, big and small, occur around me. Cubs play, bouncing in and out of thicket. A few sub-adults fight over an old scrap of meat. Mothers lower in the social hierarchy remain on the outskirts to avoid aggression from higher-ranking females and to keep their cubs out of trouble. An adult male tentatively approaches a lounging female while bobbing his head in submission. Male hyenas are subordinate to females, a highly unusual feature in mammalian societies.
I look up during a pause in the action. I’ve been recording the critical events of the morning by speaking into a digital voice recorder, and I welcome the break from hearing my own voice. I can hear a constant whoosh in the background, the sound of savannah grass leaning and swaying. Every so often, the wind strums the tallest stalks and a hollow jingle of the seeded tops plays. I see a new hyena walking towards the den and pull my binoculars to my eyes. From her playful, mousy features and broad, soft, undamaged ears, I know who it is. One of my favorite mothers—Buenos Aires, or BUAR, as she is identified in our records. At this point in my field season, I don’t bother picking up the three-inch thick binder of identification photos sitting on the back seat to confirm her identity based on the spot pattern of her coat. I take a swig of the smoky, sugary Kenyan chai that fuels these early-morning observation sessions and settle in to watch. I hope that her cubs survived through the night and that they are safely underground in the den.
As Buenos Aires makes her way towards the den, she moves through her morning rituals. One by one, she greets the other hyenas that are present, lifting her leg to expose her genitals and allowing the other individual to sniff while they lift their leg as well. It is the equivalent of a hyena handshake, and she is a particularly friendly hyena. Her own mother, the alpha female, is at the den, and when Buenos Aires sees her, her pace quickens. As she approaches her mother, she falls to the ground, rolling on her back excitedly as her mom sniffs her. Although spotted hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs, Buenos Aires looks a bit like an excited dog greeting her owner at the door after he’s been at work all day. As she continues toward the den, she joins in on interactions already in motion. Several individuals are aggressing on a low-ranking female; she joins the coalition, throwing her high social status behind the rightful aggressors.
Finally, what I’ve been waiting for. Buenos Aires approaches a hole in the ground, one of the entrances to the den, lowers her head, and emits a throaty groan. She steps back slightly, and after a brief pause, two noses poke through the opening. The dance of mothering has begun. Her cubs, Decimeter and Millimeter, emerge, called to the surface by the sound of their mother’s specific voice, and are met with vigorous maternal licks and sniffs. Their lips are peeled back, exposing full sets of tiny teeth as they “squitter” to produce a sound that any mother, hyena or human, seems to find both annoying and clear in its intent: they want to nurse. Buenos Aires walks to a shady spot, nearly tripping over her daughters as they scurry under her legs, and lies down on her side, inviting them to suckle. Once they are satiated, the cubs wrestle while Buenos Aires dozes. She opens an eye when they start biting on her ear and peels them off one at a time when their game turns into a full-out tug-of-war.
When Decimeter and Millimeter leave her side to play with other cubs, Buenos Aires lifts her head briefly to watch. There’s not much to worry about—she’s one of the highest-ranking mothers here. Buenos Aires eyes Decimeter, who is testing out the behavioral repertoire she will use to cement her high social status. But her daughter is clumsy, not yet knowing where she fits in the rigid hierarchy or recognizing the correct context in which to show behaviors. She lunges at higher-ranking cubs, gives submissive signals to females she far outranks, and frantically shows aggression and submission one after the other or all at once. When a sub-adult hyena appears to grow annoyed with Decimeter’s relentless invitations to play, and looks like she may lash out, Buenos Aires stands and approaches her daughter from behind. Standing a few feet from the annoyed teen, the orientation of her head, the pointedness of her ears, the intensity of her eyes, and the bristled hair on her tail make her message clear. We categorize aggressive behaviors into three levels of severity, and this is a “threat level 1” aggression. No contact is made; no teeth are bared. This type of aggression is an intention, a warning, a stiffening of the dusty air separating Buenos Aires and her target. The teen curves her body, lowers her tail, and turns away. Decimeter follows her mom back to their shady nursing spot.
This scene, which would have felt chaotic and mysterious to me in my first year, now feels like a cozy morning routine. Of course, I am on the lookout for anything unusual—a low-ranking hyena aggressing on a more dominant individual, a mother arriving with a new cub, a female responding to a male’s advances and leaving with him, perhaps to mate—but I’m not surprised when nothing unusual happens. The scene is still captivating, but in a way that feels familiar, even familial. Later, back at camp, I will transcribe the events of the morning into a word document and spreadsheet, distilling only the critical scientific details into several pages of abbreviated code.
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In the early days of my son’s life in 2020, at home in our self-contained Covid nest, I can sometimes see myself and this new little human through an observer’s lens. I feel the urge to collect data on myself. “Mom approach baby. Baby start nursing.” It is strange to feel as though I am observing myself while also being myself—to see myself as “mom” and him as “baby,” instead of as Julia and Ezra.
Before the baby’s arrival, I read some popular books on parenting and newborns. But now, faced with this new being and endless minute-to-minute decisions and actions and reactions, what I really want is an ethogram of human infant behavior. Ethograms—the key instrument in the toolbox of the behavioral ecologist—are descriptive inventories of specific behaviors, each one mutually exclusive from the others. The definitions are based strictly on what is observable, so that multiple people can reliably observe the same behaviors. Ethograms may also spell out which behaviors take precedence to record in the case that an individual is engaged in multiple behaviors at once, which they often are. Faced with the full range of natural behavior, an ethogram tells us what to even look at.
Many people imagine animal behavior researchers observing their subjects in the wild with pen and paper in hand, vigorously jotting down every detail or narrating the full scene into a recorder. We imagine the observer as a type of god, omniscient and omnipresent. In reality, almost all modern students of animal behavior inherit an established ethogram of their study species. These ethograms were constructed over years by the matriarchs and patriarchs of the field, who added and removed behaviors and defined new ones as they understood more.
The guiding principle behind the ethogram is that the human ability to observe is inadequate. We cannot record everything. We need to choose which behaviors are relevant, both within the lives of the animals themselves and for the research questions we want to ask. In this way, an ethogram is a guidebook, telling us what to look out for in a foreign land where we don’t know the language of the actors or the rules of the culture. Still, it takes time to learn to accurately record observations. New observers typically go through a training period in which they check their own observations against those of a seasoned observer until they have attained a high level of what is called “inter-observer reliability.” But each new observer does not need to “reinvent the wheel.” We’re able to use the knowledge and years of hard work of others to train ourselves how to see our study species. We inherit eyes through which to see our subjects.
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When studying something new, determining which behaviors to watch for is not always straightforward. In my hyena research, I added several behaviors to our standard ethogram to try to answer questions about maternal care and cub development. Many of these are the minutiae—who most often initiates contact in each mother-cub pair? Does the mother more often approach the cub or is it the other way around? How much time does each mother spend grooming each of her cubs? My hope was that, over time, a picture would emerge of how each mother and her offspring interact, and of the “maternal style” of each particular mom. Is the cub relatively clingy or independent? Is the mother fairly responsive or more laissez-faire? How do these behavioral patterns relate to the specific environmental challenges each mother is facing? In other species, these behaviors show meaningful variation across individuals and relate to environmental variables. Our hunch was that the same may be true for spotted hyenas. But the decision to record new behaviors is always, itself, a hypothesis.
When we decide to record certain behaviors, we sacrifice our ability to observe others. Recording these subtle behaviors meant I must focus on one mother-cub dyad at a time instead of collecting data on several hyenas at once; it would be impossible to record every instance of a mother and cub walking in and out of arm’s reach while also attending to the older offspring fighting in the distance. And what if, after all of this effort, these behaviors do not actually matter?
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Watching my son, and feeling an awareness of us responding to each other, I see the full mess of behavior, unclassified and unfiltered. What should I even attend to? My husband and I are in the early phase of an animal behavior study, the stage where there is no ethogram. Early observers of a species must process the full panorama of behavior. The observer may record behaviors “ad lib,” writing or narrating into a recorder a free-flowing narration as one scene steals her attention from another. Later, the observer combs through this muddled record to extract units of information—small, clean packages of content, each its own stand-alone action, interaction, or scene. It slowly becomes clear which behaviors are meaningful. Such morsels of information are elevated to the status of “data” and can then take on lives of their own: each can be sorted, manipulated, rearranged, and exposed to mathematical calculations to ultimately be made into its scientific destiny—a number.
Any attempt to collect behavioral data on my son would not be very successful. My judgment of which behaviors are meaningful—and my interpretation of what they may mean—seems to change constantly. And my husband and I definitely have not achieved “inter-observer reliability.” In the first week of his life, I think baby may have a bit of a cough. My husband disagrees. Ultimately, I agree with him that this “cough” is simply the sound he makes when he starts crying.
But other behaviors continue to demand my attention. Ezra is a bit slow to gain weight. The doctor sends us home with formula, making me feel like I am failing. I am frustrated by the baby’s afternoon pattern of urgently wanting to nurse then almost instantly falling into a deep sleep when he starts to suckle. It is somewhat comical. He starts “rooting,” shaking his head vigorously back and forth and throwing it into my breast. He looks like he is in a mosh pit. But then, within a minute of suckling, he is audibly snoring. This happens again and again most afternoons. One night, I wake myself up to wake Ezra up and try to feed him. Feeling a wave of anticipatory frustration, I remind myself of a central tenet of ethogram construction: focus on what is observable. Of course animals have intentions and emotions, but we cannot make assumptions about their underlying mental states. All we can do is record the behaviors we can see. What would it be like to watch this child—my baby—without attributing any intent to his behavior? Or to my own? Could I interact with this baby without attributing to him all the complex wants, intentions, and beliefs of a human adult? Could I observe his patterns without judging myself as somehow responsible for them? Attempting to do this eases my frustration.
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A few months in, we have gotten into the rhythm of breastfeeding. Unlike the early days, when we could run his feet under cold water without waking him up, the challenge is now to get Ezra to fall asleep when he shows signs of being tired. Should we “sleep train?” Do we impose a nap schedule? Is it “bad” for him to only nap in our laps? I soon realize that he simply does not know how to fall asleep like an adult human. The most reliable way to help him sleep is to let him nurse. I think back to those early, frustrating afternoons. Could it have been not that he was hungry and I was failing to sufficiently nurse him, but rather that he wanted to fall asleep, and sucking on me was the only way he knew how to do that? It is easy to expect that our attributions of mental states to members of other species may often be wrong, but it surprises me how often my sense of my son’s desires may be wrong also.
Six months into this study of our new little primate, I have embraced observation without an ethogram. Just when I feel like we have decoded one behavior, another turns mysterious and becomes the focus of my attention. Behaviors appear one day but disappear the next week, then resurface in a new form the following month. One morning, Ezra wakes up and is constantly practicing his “d” and “b” sounds. “Dadadadadadada, babababababa.” After about a week of these morning vocalizations, he moves on, and we rarely hear those sounds for several weeks.
Watching Ezra with fresh eyes makes me a little sad that I missed this period of early exploration when studying hyenas. It makes me wonder how much I didn’t see because I had an ethogram. In the need to create meaning and data from the observed mess of an animal’s everyday life, you necessarily lose the detail. Your aim is to quantify behaviors that are generalizable to the entire species. You must go from the particular, the personal, and the idiosyncratic to what is emblematic of the species itself.
Watching animals in the field, the day-to-day routine of observing can trick us into believing that we are seeing it all. Spotted hyenas are active overnight, but at a certain point every evening, it becomes too dark to see them, and we drive back to camp. When we see those same animals the next morning at sunrise, it is natural to fill in the missing slides from the reel and imagine that we have the complete story. Some mornings, however, we are reminded that we are not seeing it all, like the morning we spot Buenos Aires in the distance, with a blood-stained mouth from an overnight kill or the morning that Ema arrives at the den with part of her ear missing.
Even with an ethogram in hand, there are times when we see our subjects anew. Times when we are privy to a rare behavior we have only read about, or when an especially chaotic scene tests the limits of our ability to take in information, to identify individuals, to discern interactions, and to rapidly shout observations into a voice recorder. These situations are the most invigorating because, even though we strive to be objective scientists who can effortlessly decode and quantify behavior, it’s the full mess of behavior that keeps us coming back for more. The untidy particulars are what we talk about at the dinner table at camp. “Did you see the way Wellington was scooting away from her?” “Why would Baez even attempt touching Buenos Aires’ cub?” Day-to-day, we observe behavior through a double lens, with one eye towards the full, grand, beautiful mess that keeps us watching and wondering and loving the individuals we are observing, and one eye to filter, chop, data-fy, exclude, and include, like a real-time screen editor. The chaotic scenes remind us that to claim we are ever seeing it all would be hubris. Ethograms will always be inadequate.
But using an ethogram to structure how we see another animal, whether a hyena or a human, is fundamentally about the practice of training one’s attention. This methodology teaches us that observation is not a passive experience. We make active decisions as to what to attend to, what to commit to memory, and what to record as important. These days, I am watching Ezra through a high-zoom lens. I don’t want to lose any of the particulars. I want to take it all in.
Julia Greenberg is a scientist, writer, and mother living in Madison, WI. Her interest in animals, human and non-human, has led her on adventures to study the behavioral development of spotted hyenas in Kenya, the responses of ruffed grouse to climate change in Michigan, and the cognitive abilities of primates and human children. She currently teaches in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
