Confronting the exotic local wildlife: hippos, elephants and chickens
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 17/Apr/2011 18:01, 34 days ago
Hippos chilling out in lake Maga (thanks to Joost for the photo)While thePrefetwas concerned about evil sorcerers in his speech about local development during his official visit, one of the of the Mayor’s top priorities was keeping down the hippo population. While I still get excited by the huge herds of hippos in Maga’s lake, where you can see families of twenty-five a few metres away from the shore, they are a real menace. They attack fishing canoes and the occasional marauding hippo sometimes leave the lake to come and trample the rice fields. These lone hippos are often the most dangerous, because they are would-be alpha male hippos, who’ve lost out in a fight with the reigning alpha-male hippo and been cast out from the herd.Occasionally, if the hippos are causing particularly severe damage, hunting permits are issued by the Sous-Prefet so people can go and kill them. There is a hotel just outside of Maga where visiting white hunters can get rifles and have hunting trips organised for them; it’s not unusual to hear shots coming from the lake when they shoot birds and there are a few hippo skulls decorating the hotel. The visitors will also normally bag an elephant or two during the hunting season.The unsuccessful quest for elephants that ended up in Chad with Joost and Marjolein. You can see the highly'official' border post in the background. There aren’t that many elephants left in the Extreme North (mainly because of hunters) but their migratory routes do cross through the area a couple of times a year. I don’t want to kill any elephants, but I do want to see some, and when we heard that some elephants were spending a few days next to the town of Yagoua, about 80 km south of Maga, I set off with a couple of friends to try and find them.By the time we arrived in Yagoua the elephants had been and gone after destroying a large amount of the local millet crop. We didn’t regret our trip though; Yagoua is the kind of sandy Sahel town where there’s plenty going on but it feels like no-one’s in a rush. There’s also an official border crossing into Chad: ‘official’ meaning that there’s a Cameroonian flag on one side of the river, a Chadian flag on the other, a couple of very dozy customs officers, and a healthy trade in smuggled Nigerian petrol going across the border in canoes.My most traumatic recent animal related incident came neither from hippos nor elephants. On Thursday morning I’d been sleeping outdoors and had gone inside, leaving the door to the house open. I was stirring my porridge with one hand and brushing my teeth with the other when a high-pitched shrieking noise came from the corridor behind me. I screamed and the hairs on my arms had all stood up on end beforeI realised that it was only a chicken. The chicken is still in the bathroom...However I’d underestimated my opponent and relaxed too soon- the chicken ran into my bathroom, jumping on top of my toilet and knocking my last roll of toilet paper into my bucket of washing water (we haven’t had running water for a while…). I yelled, it squawked, but it didn’t want to move. We wereat a stand off. Eventually I chased it out of the bathroom, only for it to run into the kitchen. It ran in circles round the kitchen table. I ran round the kitchen table after it, yelling pithy insults such as “idiot chicken”.Meanwhile a cheeping revealed that the chicken’s chick had also entered and was doing its own tour round the Sultan’s reception room. I had to make an on the spot decision between chasing the chick and chasing the chicken. I decided that the chicken was more likely to destroy more of my possessions in a shorter amount of time, and carried on chasing it.After about five circuits round the table the chicken finally found the kitchen door, but instead of heading back outside it went straight back into the bathroom. We repeated the whole process of yelling abuse, squawking, running out of the corridor and round the kitchen tableall over again.Eventually after more thanfifteen minutesthe chicken finally found the door to my house. I’m not sure which of us was more traumatised by our encounter. The chick I never saw again, so for all I know it’s still there.