BULAWAYO – Tourists on a game drive in northern Zimbabwe came to a distressing sight: 12 buffaloes stuck in the mud.
Game rangers believe the buffaloes were driven into a muddy floodplain by lions on a riverine fringe of the Zambezi River at Matetsi Game Reserve, 55km west of the coal-mining town of Hwange.
Stunned tourists could barely believe their eyes after driving up to a lion feast early Saturday, with three of the buffaloes already having fallen prey to the kings of the wild. Nine were rescued.
“We believe the buffaloes had been stuck for several hours, perhaps a day or two,” said Tinashe Farawo, spokesman for the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Authority.
“The buffaloes are quite heavy animals, with adults weighing in at about 590kg. It was quite easy for them to sink in the mud, and they became easy pickings for lions and scavengers like hyenas and vultures.”
Tour guides, game rangers and local farmers spent nearly 12 hours rescuing the animals from the mud in a very dangerous operation that required rangers to physically hook a rope around a buffalo’s horns.
The ropes were attached to a tractor and an old Land Rover which used their four-wheel-drive power to drag the stricken animals to safety.
Once the animals were out of the mud, however, the rescuers were confronted with a new perilous job of unhooking the ropes from the buffaloes’ horns.
“The animals were a bit disoriented, like the proverbial wounded buffalo. Some didn’t have a lot of energy left and were relatively easy to release from the rope, but for the others it was not straight forward,” Farawo said by phone from Harare.
“In one instance, one buffalo got really heated and was having a go at the tyres of the Land Rover. We’re just thankful nobody was hurt, but it illustrates once more the bravery and commitment of game rangers and our partners in the private game reserves.”
Farawo, however, said they were short on resources to guarantee that a similar incident would not happen. Zimbabwe’s national parks were “so huge, it’s difficult to cover the whole area through patrols and radio communications,” he said.
An appeal will go out soon for drones to be used by rangers in the fight against poaching and identifying animals in distress.
“On this occasion, these animals are lucky that tourists happened to drive near that area,” he said.
