Bloody buffalo
A column of a friend, Kian "Shaka" Barker, who runs a local safari tour company.
He's got a way with words, so let's give him some internetspace 
!
Greetings and Salutation,
These are greetings and salutations from a soon to be less noisy St. Lucia Village, when the hogs (Harleys) disappear over the western horizon. Apart from the Hogs and their head banging noise in St. Lucia, there was a little head banging inside the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park last night. In fact to such an extent that there was a little and I would go as far as say, quite a bit of blood to go around. Blood tends to be very spectacular when it is seen in a spot light. So, yes as you guessed right, this email is about last nights' Shakabarker Nite Drive.
The culprits involved were Buffalo, the ones that live near the 'fence line' (ranger terminology again), three of them, sometimes affectionately referred to as the Three Stooges. So, for some unexplained reason, they had decided to start a fight amongst themselves. In the animal Kingdom, fights tend not to last very long and are over fairly quickly. Usually the biggest and ugliest walks away - King, and there is usually something to fight about, like food, females, territory. A little different to humans, we throw each other in an arena and beat the hell out of each other for money and then if we are not happy with this, we throw a couple of woman in the arena. Some of them get flattened. If this does not get the crowds excited then the ref gets done, furniture and half the decor and then more furniture and fittings get flattened. But the real cherry on top is when the presenter gets a fat lip. Ever watched WWF*. Well, this tends not to be the case in the animal kingdom. The rules and regulations are fairly well respected. And I say generally, but in the case of the buffalo last night, there appeared to be nothing to fight about, as these buffalo live "happily together" and there were no females present or in the nearby vicinity - maybe it was just a male thing or an affliction of low IQ.
But in the case of the three stooges something seemed to have gone horribly wrong, and should I say someone got their toes fairly well and truly stomped on. Or should I say their hooves , as what appeared to be a little friendly head banging had escalated into a full blown fight. So, when we arrived at this buffalo sighting, the first thing I noticed was these buffalo ignored us. This indicated that there was something they were pre-occupied with. Then I noticed their necks were covered with bleeding wounds and then when one of the buffalo turned around, one of the guests sitting near the back of the vehicles said: "Oh dear, look at all the blood on it's eye!" Well, that was the understatement of the evening. There was half a bucket of blood. One thing about WWF*, the fight would have been stopped. But Buffalo have several buckets of blood in their bodies and they duly ignored us and the Unimog and continued to rut/fight. And one thing that is certain, is that when buffalo clash horn it is a bone chilling thud. But eventually they got tired of the spotlights (Arena) and moved off to a darker part of the park, to continue their altercation. We departed from the Buffalo Fight arena and headed off to "molest" smaller antelope and leaf stitching ants with our spotlights, which made for a little more sedate tour.
So, in summary - night drives have been good over the past week or two, including quite a few porcupine and genets. General game has been good and even the night temperatures have been reasonable. But still the hottest commodity is the Hot Chocolate and dunked rusks.
Cheers for now,
The Nite Driver
* WWF - this is not the World Wildlife Fund
1 votes
