Children swimming with Crocodiles

'Trust only tap water - any other water in the Lowveld should be treated as if there's crocodiles in it'.
My grandpa used to hammer this into our heads as children.

Good thing he did.

Just outside the town of White River lies the most spectacular farm with a couple of beautiful dams.
We used to fish and have picnics under the huge Camel Thorn trees at the Fish Eagle dam.
The dam was fed by springs and the run-off of summer storms, and the closest river was the Crocodile River, some fifteen miles down the valley.

My kids were forbidden to play in the water, and my incessant concerns fell on deaf ears as far as the other parents were concerned.  Old wives' tales etc.

I borrowed a croc capture cage from my friend Cobus Raath in the Kruger Park, and set the trap.  I drove out to check on it every morning and every evening for weeks on end. Nothing.

I'm sure the friends were sniggering behind my back.

The water level receded as winter progressed, and I had to keep moving the cage in order to keep it half submerged.

Then, one morning I noticed from a distance that the drop-gate on the cage had been triggered.  To my utter disappointment there was not a ripple on the water in the cage. 
However, the moment I touched the cage all hell broke loose - the croc exploded from the water, jaws snapping wildly.
This was one mean mother.

I notified Nature Conservation as well as my friend Elise Visagie, one of the co-owners.  I asked her to go get her son Erwin out of school.  Erwin was about ten years old at the time, and one of the more enthusiastic swimmers in the dam.

Erwin didn't like what he saw close-up.

With the help of the officials we got the cage on the back of my truck, and we released the croc on the banks of the Crocodile River.

In this picture Elise is standing next to the cage with folded arms, contemplating her son's swimming mate.

Needless to say, this unusual sight on the road during morning rush hour created some chaos.

Heading for its new home

Needless to say Erwin preferred swimming pools with crystal clear water from that day.  But tough young Lowveld kids being what they are, it only lasted for a couple of months....

Remarkable how memories can fade, eh Erwin?

Behold the beauty of the Boomslang (Tree Snake)

As stated in an earlier posting, Yzerfontein has lots of snakes.
On an early walk yesterday I noticed one of my neighbours having some very nice trees trimmed down to skeletons.  She told me that particular thicket was home to a monster of a boomslang.
Well.... it was her trees so I refrained from commenting.

Later in the afternoon, returning from a scenic drive with visiting family, my wife Monica spotted a huge snake crossing the driveway two houses down the road.  For some obscure reason she shrieked.
I must admit, this was a very impressive boomslang - by far the biggest I've ever seen.

I jumped out and gingerly herded the monster towards a secluded shrub, where it obligingly took refuge.  I phoned Johan, Yzerfontein's local Snake Whisperer, while circling the bush to discourage the snake from bolting.

The good man pitched up within five minutes, armed with the tools of his trade.

The snake didn't make things easy for Johan.

"I know you're in there somewhere......"

After a while he managed to extricate it unharmed.  The boomslang is one of the most beautiful snakes, displaying colours varying from bright orange through olive green to black.

The snake was released in the nearby National Park where it will undoubtedly find a new thicket to call home.

The boomslang is, as a rule, not an aggressive snake and will only bite when provoked.  The venom is highly potent but slow working.  It takes several hours after a bite before any symptoms set in, so there is plenty of time to get to a hospital.  Don't let the lack of symptoms fool you into thinking the bite was not serious - if left untreated you will be dead in one to three days.

Several years ago the famous herpetologist Karl Schmidt died following the bite of a boomslang.


I love Yzer!

Explosive secret on mistery island.

Opposite the northern tip of the city of Maputo, on the African East Coast, there lies a small island some five kilometres offshore.
It is shrouded in mystery and strictly a no-go, forbidden area.  The locals refer to it as 'Jail Island' or 'Hell Island.'  Nobody could ever tell me anything about it.
The dark secrecy fascinated me, and I always wanted to go there.  The only information I ever managed to unearth was the island's name: 'Ilha Xefina Grande'.  (These days one can look it up on Google Earth - check out the naval gun emplacements on the north-eastern shoreline.)

Then, one day, opportunity came knocking in the form of Rui Mattias.

Rui was about as secretive as the island itself.  At the time when we were trying to renovate the zoo (see earlier postings), Maputo was the poorest city in the world.  Civil war was raging, and conditions were precarious.  Amidst all this, Rui was living like a king.  How he did it, and why he chose to befriend me, remains a mystery.

Rui had the means, and I had the obsession.  I eventually managed to convince him that the war would be keeping the authorities way too busy to be keeping an eye on a deserted island.  It was before the advent of mobile phones, but Rui had a radio telephone in his new Range Rover.

Within an hour of contacting his pilot, we were buzzing the island with his King Air, looking for any sign of human presence.  There was no sign of present habitation, and the sight of ruins and half submerged gun emplacements got us really fired up.

Another hour later we were on his boat, heading for the island.  From what we could see from the air, the shore on the seaward side had been eroded to the extent that some gun emplacements were semi-submerged, and concrete pillboxes had been undermined and had rolled out into the sea.
Dropping anchor on the leeward side we started exploring the extensive ruins - what appeared to have been army barracks, and a jail.  Definitely a jail, and a pretty horrible one at that.  The cells were windowless 1 x 2 metre cubicles behind serious bars. The roofs being long-gone, all the floors were covered in a foot of stinking water.  We did not linger.

The naval guns were monstrous.  The great rusted hulks resembled Saddam Hussein's gigantic cannon.
The emplacements had huge steel doors at the back, mostly buried in sand.  I found one that appeared to be ever so slightly ajar, and started digging.

What I found nearly gave me a heart attack.

 

 

                                                                                                                                          

 
Thousands upon thousands of them, all oozing some gooey stuff.  All of this, unguarded, in a country in the middle of a fifteen year civil war!  I was convinced that the stuff was highly unstable and a loud noise might set it off, blowing the island and half the city out of existence.

Time to get out smartly.  The skipper had remained on the boat, so only Rui and I knew about this.  We decided to keep it that way.
I'm sure the skipper was convinced we had seen the devil himself on the island, but he never enquired about the frantic departure.

Now that the story is out after more than 20 years, I cannot help but wonder if there is someone out there who would care to follow it up.  Maybe my good friend Irma Green might be tempted to send over an investigative journalist?  Someone with a big, brass pair....

More promised pictures.

Maputo Crocodiles: Confirmation that the first batch of drugs was not working.

Determining the sex of a croc.

The baby crocodiles in their new home.

 

 

Another lion arrives at the Sperm Bank.

Administering general anaesthetic.

Refer back to older posts for more info.

The buffalo that refused to die.

Once in a while there are days that start out as fairly predictable and straight-forward, and end up turning into sweaty nightmares.
This was one of those.  It happened near the Albasini Ruins in the Kruger National Park.

Joao Albasini was probably the first white settler in the inhospitable Eastern Lowveld wilderness, known today as the Kruger National Park.  In the 19th century he established a permanent trading post on the banks of a small spruit, despite the dangers of malaria and tsetse flies.  The Albasini Ruins is one of the few places in the Park where tourists are allowed to get out of their vehicles in order to view the site.  An armed ranger is present at all times.

My friend Tom Yssel (then regional ranger of the Pretotiuslop division) phoned me one evening to ask if I would care to accompany him the next day to sort out what appeared to be a wounded buffalo.  This happened from time to time whenever a problem animal was in a particularly difficult area.  The dense reed beds of the Albasini spruit definitely qualified as such, especially during a wet summer.  I exalted in these adrenalin-high excursions and my wife loathed them - she hates lies, even little white ones.  She would have to re-schedule the next day's appointments, telling the patients that the good Doctor is unwell (kidney stone, migraine, flu etc.) and would therefore not be available for the day. She was also not very keen on me traipsing off into the tall grass with Tom, to "do all sorts of stupid things".  Fortunately she never really understood half of it.

At first light we were at Albasini, accompanied by Tom's tracker and a junior ranger.  The buffalo had been seen frequenting the dense reeds in the vicinity, and had been growing more belligerent by the day.  The previous day it had treed all three rangers on a bicycle patrol.  Nobody was sure if it had been injured or was just being plain aggressive.  Either way, it posed a serious threat to tourists.

Fresh tracks led straight into the dense reeds.  Going in on foot would be tantamount to suicide, as visibility was down to less than two yards.  Tom had his trusty canon (.458 Winchester Magnum) and I was armed with an R1 assault rifle.  The 7.62mm calibre is a little on the light side for buffalo, but on the upside you can have twenty tries in half as many seconds.  Precision shooting might not be on the menu, and with Tom's artillery piece as backup the R1 was good for the job.

The tracker got onto the bulbar, and with the junior ranger driving, Tom and I got on the back of the truck.
We would nose the truck into the reeds and creep as far as we could, looking for freshly trodden reeds.  Every time we found some, we would back up and re-enter the reeds hundred yards further down stream.
By about 10 am there was no indication that the buffalo had gone past our 'inspection line' and there was no sign that it had exited the reeds by climbing the steep opposite bank.  Now we were fairly certain that it was somewhere in an area spanning 100 x 50 yards.  Not that it really meant a damn thing, because the reeds were up to eight feet high, and as thick as the hair on a hound.
Plan B:  We would cut the area into 20 yard strips with the truck.  There would be no other option but for Tom to try for a spine shot, and I would follow up with the R1. 
On our second entry a tornado erupted in the reeds right in front of the vehicle.  The buff was heading further down stream at speed, offering only glimpses of its broad back.  Tom fired, and I followed up with a couple of double-taps but the buff just kept going.
Back to the old procedure, this time finding trampled reeds with lots of blood on them.  Every now and again we would catch fleeting glimpses of the black locomotive and pump streams of lead at it, to no avail.  By then we were beginning to hope it would succumb to lead poisoning.

We were a couple of miles away from Albasini by 3pm and flagging a bit in the heat.  The buffalo was still going strong when we came to a tourist road.  The reeds were a little sparser here.  With no blood on the road, we concluded that the animal was holed up in a small clump of reeds next to the road.  Due to the water we couldn't get closer than 15 yards with the vehicle.  We disembarked and tentatively walked a few yards.  In the stream we sank into the coarse sand up to our knees.  We re-assessed the situation.  Going in on foot was not an option and we decided to back up and approach from the opposite side.

Both Tom and I had 9mm Parabellums with extended magazines as standard equipment.  I drew mine and emptied the 20-shot clip into the reeds, probably out of frustration.  No movement.

We backed up, and as we crossed the small bridge, the clump of reeds exploded and the buffalo stormed across the road behind us.  He had a clear 30 yards to go, and we gave him the bad news big-time.  I suspect the Toyota sounded like an Apache Longbow attack helicopter.  The buff kept going and disappeared into another clump of reeds.
"No way", Tom said.  Well, something like that, but rather more spicy.
Some ten yards in there was a solid 'thump' and the reeds stopped moving.  We looked at each other.  "Yeah", Tom said and we disembarked once more.
Midway through reloading, the buffalo grunted, and we could hear its laboured breathing.  The reloading became rather feverish.  We eyed the thicket, but nothing happened.  Tom shrugged, took aim at the point from which the breathing emanated, and started emptying his magazine.  So did I. 
In the silence following the thunder the buffalo grunted and kept on breathing.
"No way", Tom said.  We reloaded and repeated the fusillade.
The buff grunted.
We reloaded once again and decided we had no option - this is it.  We went in, me on my knees and Tom upright directly behind me.  I would push the reeds aside with the muzzle of my rifle, with Tom ready to shoot.  Then a few inches forward, and he would push the reeds aside with me ready to fire.
Dead ahead the buffalo was still breathing audibly, and grunting from time to time.
This was sweaty work, and we were pumping adrenaline big-time.
With one last sweep we were right on top of the buffalo, close enough to touch.
Mortally wounded, it had fallen into the streambed behind a three foot bank.  Both the bank and the uppermost six inches of the animal were shot to pieces.  We felt very, very sorry for the animal as we administered the necessary.  We plonked down on our backsides next to the animal. "F*** me", we said in unison.  It had stopped breathing.  At last.
The tracker, standing on top of the buffalo

When skinning the buffalo that night, we found three 9mm bullets embedded just beneath the skin.  Why on earth it didn't charge at that stage remains an open question.  We were extremely vulnerable at that point.

 Maybe my good wife had a point....