Carnivores
Namibia is home to an assortment of 34 carnivore species. Ranging from little one such as Spottednecked Otter to the elusive leopard.
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V. chama
Cape Fox
Vulpes chama
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Cape foxes are omnivorous, eating both plants and animals. With a preference to invertebrates and small mammals such as rodents
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The Cape fox is Nocturnal, it is most active just before dawn or after dusk. Typically it shelters in burrows underground or dense thickets during the day.
The Cape fox is an active digger and it will excavate its own burrow, although it generally modifies an abandoned burrows of other species, such as the Springhare.
It's not territorial, but will mark it's territories with a pungent scent.
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Bat-eared fox
Otocyon megalotis
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O. megalotis
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Predominantly an insectivore(80–90% of their diet is harvester termites. It rarely eats birds, small mammals, reptiles, and fungi. Their water needs are met by the insects they eat.
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The Bat-eared fox is nocturnal 85% of the time, in the more Northern parts of Africa, how ever in the Southern parts they are only nocturnal during the summer & diurnal during the winter.
They are highly social animals, often living in pairs or groups of up to 15.With home ranges of different groups either overlapping substantially or very little. Individuals will forage, play, and rest together as a group, helping protect against predators. Mature adults will groom throughout the years, but also between young adults and mature adults.
An important part of their communication is visuals. When they are looking intently at something, their head is held high, ears are erect and facing forward, and the mouth is closed. When an individual is threatened or showing submission, the ears will be pulled back and lying against the head and the head is lowered. The tail is also used for visual communication. To appear to be a larger figure, they will use piloerection, which is when hairs are standing straight, particularly in highly dangerous occurrences.
From 30 meters away a bat-eared fox can recognize another of it's kind. The process is a three step process:ignoring the individual, a stare intently, and lastly they approach or attack without displays.
During a greeting, the advancing individual will symbolically submit which is received by the other individual with a high head and tail down. In this process a few vocalizations are used for communication.
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Bat-eared foxes are predominantly socially monogamous, however polygynous groups
Pups that are born in the Kalahari region are born September–November.
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Lion
Panthera leo
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P. leo
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Grasslands and savannas
A lions diet is mainly of mammals, especial ungulates.They prefer zebra, blue-wildebeest, African buffalo. On occasion, they will hunt giraffes or gemsbok. It is also common for them to hunt warthog depending on availability, at times using them to teach cubs some hunting skills. Human encroachment has increasingly put domestic livestock on their menu, which in turn has cause human an wildlife to conflict immensely with Namibia being no expectation. Although they are apex hunters, lions will scavenge in desperate times such as drought season. Lions will kill other predators such as leopard, cheetah and spotted hyena but this is mostly elimination of competition rather than consumption driven killings.
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Lions spend most of their day resting. Roughly 20 hours of their day is spent being inactive. They can be active at anytime of the day, however after dusk is normally where their activity peaks. In these periods they will socialize, groom and defecate.Dawn is when the hunting most often will happen.
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The majority of lionesses reproduce at fours years old. There is no specific mating seasons for lions, but where resources are abundant it is more likely that lions will mate. Females are polyestrous.
Cubs(lion of springs) are born blind, their eyes will open around seven days after being born. Cubs even suckle indiscriminately from any or all of the nursing females in the pride.