The diet of the striped hyena in Nepal’s lowland regions

Striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena) are extremely rare in Nepal and only a few people have studied them in their natural forest and grassland habitat. Their rarity is due to anthropogenic pressures such as hunting, habitat modification, being killed on roads, and depletion of their natural prey. Here, we studied the feeding ecology of hyenas in lowland, Nepal. We employed an opportunistic sampling to collect hyena scats in a range of habitats, and the line transect sampling to identify the prey of the hyena in the study site. We collected 68 hyena scats between 2015 and 2018. Most of the hyena scat (39.7%) was found in the Churia Hill forest followed by riverbed (26.4%), mixed forest (14.7%), Sal (Shorea robusta), dominated forest (11.7%), and grassland area (7.3%). We found eleven mammalian prey species, plants and some unidentified items in the hyena scats. The frequency of occurrence and relative biomass of the medium-sized wild boar (Sus scrofa) was higher than other smaller prey species...