… is the Wildebeest, also called “Gnu” (which is the sound these animals often make).
When you visit our reserve, you will see them 5-10 times on each game drive, if not more often.
Sometimes it is a lone male, in his “territory”, trying to attract females, or it is large herds, sometimes up to 50-70 animals, and more, happily grazing away. We often think of them as lion food (and they certainly find them tasty), but they are interesting in their own right, and no safari would be complete without having seen this typical African animal.
So what are wildebeests: well, a bit surprisingly, they are actually antelopes.
There are two kinds of wildebeest, and the one you will see here is the “Blue wildebeest”. In Eastern Africa, they are famous for the mass migrations which occur twice a year. But they don’t do that here.
Wildebeest were first spotted at approximately 1700 by Dutch settlers while migrating to the interior of South Africa. Because of their resemblance to wild cattle they called them “wild ox” or, when translated: “wildebeest”.
One of the things that we have observed here, and which is true, is that they are very far from being sharp tools in the box. Actually, they are quite dumb animals. They are known to run away from lions or other predators, and while running away, suddenly stop again … because they forgot why they were running in the first place, to then suddenly start running again when they see the lions approach again. Stupid! Gilles has himself filmed wildebeest stubbornly refusing to run away from lions in time, despite their obvious presence, and in the end, believe it or not, two of them get killed. Totally unnecessarily, and totally, totally stupid.
We must have many hundreds of them on the reserve, if not well over a thousand, because we see them all the time.
Here some photos that Chad and Uyai took today.
And here a video that Gilles and I made about 2 months ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgpl4w9-U1A
