Crocuta crocuta
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Aberdare National Park, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for October, with the widest coverage in October. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 5 squares of 10 km carry records for Spotted Hyena in and around Aberdare National Park, and the 9 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
Forget the folklore. The spotted hyena is one of Africa's most capable predators and its most complicated society: clans of up to 80, ruled entirely by females, who are larger and more aggressive than the males and inherit rank like aristocracy. Perhaps 30,000 to 45,000 remain across Africa. They kill most of what they eat, running down wildebeest and gemsbok in relay over kilometers, and then process the entire animal with bone-cracking jaws that measure among the strongest of any land mammal. The whoop, that rising oo-OOP carrying through the dark, is a clan keeping track of itself. Watch one lope past your vehicle at dusk and the cringing scavenger of cartoons dissolves for good.
Keep well back from dens. Disturbed clans move cubs to poorer sites, and small cubs pay for it.