Battle for the President's Elephants by Sharon Pincott

Author:Sharon Pincott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Big, and Little, Fives

Africa’s Big Five is somewhat of a misnomer to me. It includes elephant, the largest land mammal; lion, the largest carnivore; rhino, an endangered relic of times past; leopard, the personification of feline beauty; and buffalo, the largest bovid. ‘Who’, I’ve often wondered, ‘would sensibly include the buffalo in such a list, before the likes of the beautifully sleek, lightning-fast cheetah?’

The Big Five is, in fact, a term coined by sport-hunters and has nothing to do with the magnificence of the animal. It actually refers to the most difficult African beasts to hunt on foot and the degree of danger involved. The tourists who come to the African bush merely to tick off the Big Five miss out on so much. We owe it to ourselves and to the wildlife to look further afield, at more than just these five large mammals.

I personally favour the Little Five, which opens tourists’ eyes to the smaller wonders, and evokes a deeper appreciation of the world of wildlife. Instead of elephant, our focus is directed to the elephant shrew. Rather than lion, we seek out an ant lion. In the place of rhino, we look for rhinoceros beetles. Instead of buffalo, we admire the red-billed buffalo weavers. As an alternative to leopard, we keep a close eye out for a leopard tortoise. Suddenly, there’s a whole new, miniature world to revel in.

Small and mouse-like, the elephant shrew has a long snout and large rounded ears. It’s a solitary animal that feeds largely on insects, including the well-armoured dung beetle.

The adult ant lion is rather like a damselfly, but the term ant lion (also called a doodlebug given the trails, or doodles, that it leaves in the sand) refers to the rather ferocious larval form. These larvae live in pits in soft sand, awaiting prey such as ants to fall in, which are then grasped by tiny, but surprisingly strong, jaws.

The imposing horn of the male rhino beetle comes in handy when confronting its rivals during the mating season. Among the largest of beetles, they’re shiny black and nocturnal.

The buffalo weaver is adorned with black plumage, white wing patches and a robust red bill. They’re a social weaver, famed for their vast, untidy communal nests of twigs that festoon the branches of trees in the veld.

Just like Buddie, the leopard tortoise is a large, attractively marked tortoise that can, contrary to popular opinion, move surprisingly quickly.

Of course there are countless other smaller creatures that are equally enchanting, many of these most prominent in the wet season. There are the captivating fireflies, with a light-producing organ at the tip of their abdomen, usually found near water. There are the sweet foam-nest frogs with their soft chirping, that turn almost white in daylight, and the stunning emperor moths with large eye-spots on oversized wings. The longhorn beetles, with antennae longer than their strikingly coloured bodies, are comical – they squeak when they’re handled. The curious, bright-red velvet mites, which appear with the rains, are the only arachnid that I’m really fond of.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.