ABOUT THIS IMAGE... ‘Kudu Cannibal’

 
Marakele National Park (in the Limpopo Province of South Africa) straddles the foothills of the Waterberg Plateau. The western part of the park is rather flat and covered by the typical lowland bushveld found in this part of the country; the eastern part incorporates the first hills and lower mountains of the Waterberg itself. I was visiting this gem of a park in August (midwinter in the southern hemisphere) and the time when the bushveld is compressed to a palette of yellows, browns and greys.

In July and August of the year before my visit, several people had reported sightings of aardvark in the early and late hours of the day. Members of my extended family had even returned with cell phone videos of an aardvark traipsing through grassland in splendid morning light. I had not been able to visit Mokala at that time, but I reckoned that a visit the following year might afford me an opportunity to photograph these nocturnal beasts too. No luck! No one, not even the staff, had seen any aardvark during the day again since the previous year.
 
I never rely solely on one photographic objective. I have never understood the mania of people desperately needing to spot particular species in any wilderness environment. The African bush and landscape form an integral whole of sights, sounds, perfumes, textures and tastes (if, like me, you will stuff wild fruit, grass stems and leaves into your mouth). (Please do not simply taste any vegetable or animal matter. Inform yourself beforehand whether it is safe to do so.) To me, the entirety of the bushveld makes up the experience, not just isolated sightings of a few species. So, in the absence of aardvark, I enjoyed the challenge of capturing the bushveld in its magnificent winter dress.

Wildlife photography is very hard work. The spectacular images presented by photographers make up only a miniscule fraction of time, a few seconds at most, of a year's worth of searching. For several reasons my own trip this time around was proving to be quite a challenge – nothing seemed to work out, nothing seemed to ping into place.
 
One afternoon, as I was leaving the campsite to spend the late afternoon hours hunting shots, I spotted a lone kudu cow in a dense thicket. She was truly stuck in the thick of it and the light was still quite harsh. Therefore, I trundled past at slow speed so that I would not spook her. I had already moved passed this kudu cow and cast a last glance at her. Something was up; she was chewing on something very large, definitely not a bunch of leaves. I drove on for another 25 metres and turned around for another look. As I approached very slowly, the kudu cow moved into an even denser part of the thicket.

Through the branches and leaves, I could see that the kudu was chewing on a knee-joint of some long-dead animal*. She kept on tossing her head back in order to change the grip of her teeth on this unusual fare. She had started frothing from the corners of the mouth, so intense were her efforts at chewing the sinews and bone of her extraordinary meal.

The light was not ideal and leaves, twigs and branches blocked the view; and yet I kept on taking photographs. The actions of the kudu cow, chewing on a piece of another kudu, as it turned out, kept me engrossed. (Later, I located the remainder of the timeworn carcass some 20 metres down the road and confirmed my inklings about the species that had provided this extraordinary meal.) Somehow, the harsh lighting and the chaos of branches augmented my uncanny experience of this incredible sighting of a ‘Kudu Cannibal’.

 

*   I have written previously about osteophagy (the eating of bone by animals) and the possible reasons why this behaviour is relatively common among wild herbivores.