At CITES 1989 the delegates were told that it would cost US $ 200 per square kilometer to protect Africa’s elephants in their natural... »
African Nimrods
Buffalo populations (Part 2)
During the quarter of a century succeeding the year 1871 (during which I first visited South Africa) the range of the buffalo had been very much curtailed, but up to 1896 these animals were still numerous in many of the uninhabited parts of the country, and especially so in the Pungwe river district of... »
The Native Hunter. (Part 4)
Natives, whose villages are on a big river or lake, live almost entirely on fish. The smaller streams and dambos, which dry up in the dry weather, they stake across at intervals, to prevent the fish from escaping, and when only a small pool is left, as the dry weather progresses, they spear the... »
Buffalo Populations
As was to be expected, the rhinoceroses were the first to go, but the buffaloes, in spite of their prodigious numbers in many parts of South Africa only a generation ago, did not long survive them, for wherever the epidemic of rinderpest penetrated in 1896 it almost completely destroyed all the buffaloes which up... »
The Native Hunter. (Part 3)
The wood of the bow, which is about 4ft. long, is made from a tree called ” tenza,” and the string of the spinal tendons of certain animals, eland and kudu being the best. The arrows are made of a reed called ” bango,” and are about 2ft. long, with about 6in of soft... »
An incident on the Dett Vlei.
Even in my own time all the great game of Southern Africa was in places still abundant, and a scene, which I once witnessed in October 1873, will never fade from my memory. I was at that time hunting elephants in the country to the south-east of the Victoria Falls, and one afternoon, when approaching... »
The Native Hunter. (Part 2)
With the wealth of information, which must be stored in the native’s mind about animals and their ways, it is with the utmost difficulty that any of it can be elicited. If asked a question, he is so occupied with trying to give you the answer you want, trying not to give himself away... »
EXTINCTION AND DIMINUTION OF GAME IN SOUTH AFRICA
Since the first settlement of Europeans at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century, two species of the indigenous fauna of South Africa have become absolutely extinct These are the blaauwbok (Hippotragus ietuaphaeus) and the true quagga (Equus quagga). Both these animals, however, were nearly related to species which still exist in... »
The Native Hunter. (Part 1)
The native is a keen hunter, but we are inclined to think that his hunting instinct is derived more from a love of meat and a lust of killing than from any sporting feeling. Some people think that the native is ill-used in not being allowed a free hand to shoot in his own... »
Cheetah (Part 2)
Two years later, in October 1887, I was riding one day with three English gentlemen (Messrs. J. A. Jameson, Frank Cooper, and A. Fountaine, all of whom are alive to-day and will be able to corroborate my story) through the country lying between the upper waters of the Sebakwe and Umniati rivers in Mashunaland.... »
Vital Shots: Buck.
It is very difficult in a discussion like this to avoid repetition, as all animals are built much alike as far as their interior anatomy goes. Buck will be generally shot in the body unless occasionally in the case of the larger species such as roan, sable, waterbuck; or kudu, but even these ought... »