Why this Hippo Prefers the Sewage Plant to the Nature Reserve.
Wildlife authorities are battling to get a hippo to leave the Cape Flats Sewage Plant and move back to the more natural environment of the Zeekoevlei Nature Reserve in which he was born.
While this is a lighthearted post, its worth noting that many believe the hippo and not the lion or the crocodile is the animal responsible for most human deaths in Africa.
The young four year old hippo left the reserve several days ago and moved into the sewage works at Zandvlei, where he has been resisting all attempts to send him home. Its not a simple matter to move a hippo which weighs 800 kg and spends most of the day in the water. Conservation workers have been erecting fences and gates to restrict his movements and guide him home.
- » See also: Are Cougars Really Extinct in Ontario, Canada?
- » Get EcoWorldly by RSS or sign up by email.
The maturing hippo was apparently chased off by his father, whose position he was starting to threaten. Twenty metres of fencing stolen from the southern section of the reserve, gave him his chance to move to “the other side of the fence” where he found the abundant water and lush vegetation of the sewage plant “greener”. He is in an area of the sewage works where few people venture, so there in no immediate danger. Should he not be able to reconcile with his father in the nature reserve, he will need to be moved elsewhere.
This is by no means the first time hippos, who tend to get nicknames as their time in the press grows, have wandered around South Africa.
Houdini, a 2 year old calf, who lived up to his name, was a previous escapee from Zeekoevlei - he took 10 months to recapture.
Nonkululeko wandered freely for months on her journey from the St Lucia wetlands in Kwa Zulu Natal to the outskirts of Durban, 200 km to the south. Along the way she was spotted surfing just like her cousins in Gabon’s Loango National Park which National Geographic described as “the land of the surfing hippos“.
Huberta, who is probably the best known, even having a wikipedia entry, left her home in the St. Lucia Estuary on a 1600 km, three year trip that ended in East London in the Eastern Cape. During the trip she became a celebrity. Her name was changed from the original Hubert, when it was realised she was a cow. She was shot by hunters who were arrested and fined £25, because she had been declared Royal Game which gave only the British Royal Family the right to hunt her. Her body was sent to a taxidermist in London, was greeted by 20,000 people when she returned to South Africa in 1932 and can now be seen in the Amathole Museum in King William’s Town.
Photo Credit: By Patrick Gijsbers in Wikipedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License
