RHODESIA (NOW ZIMBABWE), 1974
During two nocturnal adventures when I went hunting crop-raiding hippos, I “lost” my quarry in the middle of the night. I never heard them running away. They simply disappeared. On a third occasion, I bumped up my “lost” hippo, whereafter it raced back to the nearby Lundi River. I had all but stood on it before it moved! These experiences led me to suspect that, when disturbed on land at night, and when the cover is good, hippos quietly settle onto the ground, lie dead still and let the cause of the disturbance move away instead of making good their escape. I was keen to confirm this behaviour.
In 1974 I captured and translocated 30 hippos from a pool in Rhodesia’s Sabi River. During this exercise, I perfected the use of a very potent paralysing drug called phencyclidine. So, when the provincial game warden, Doug Newmarch, asked me if I would try to capture and move a problem hippo out of Kyle National Park, I eagerly agreed. It was a young bull that had taken to grazing the irrigated, fertilised lawns in the national park camping ground. When wandering all over the green grass, it periodically tripped over guy ropes and collapsed tents on top of sleeping visitors. The animal was never aggressive, but there was always the chance that someone could get hurt.
I went to Kyle on the day before full moon to catch the hippo and take it to the nearby Mushandike Dam to release it. When I arrived at Kyle, I immediately sent my Bushman tracker, Ben, to track the animal and determine its nocturnal movements. As I had suspected, there was a single, well-worn hippo path linking the camping ground with the lake shore. I discussed the logistics with Paul Read, the game warden of Kyle National
