This was the unbelievable moment a wildlife enthusiast and avid photographer witnessed a crocodile trying to tear a honey badger apart in the water!
This unbelievable sighting happened on the H14, Ngobeni short loop in the Kruger National Park. Sheila tells us about her unforgettable experience on a self-drive safari where she witnessed a Crocodile take down a honey badger.
“It was a slow-going Saturday morning and we were particularly looking for leopards. We scanned the Ngobeni loop, just off the H14, not expecting to find next, what we had. We came across a crocodile wrestling, what initially seemed like a massive Barbel-fish.”
“Upon driving closer and picking up my Canon 7dmkii camera, I realized what was happening. When I started photographing the action it became clear that the crocodile had a honey badger clenched in its jaws! The crocodile was trying to rip the honey badger to shreds!”
“Badgers are renowned for being absolutely fearless creatures of the bush and are also one of my personal favorites. So of course this had me absolutely horrified, observing what the crocodile had been doing to the badger.”
“We sat there for a good hour watching this crocodile just trying its utter best to try and rip the badger apart. We then moved out of the sighting only to come back an hour later, to the crocodile now lying on the sandbank with its victim still protruding from its teeth – still intact.
“We returned Sunday to see what had happened in the meantime – but there was no sign of the Crocodile or its Badger-prey. My advice to any wildlife enthusiast would be to always be patient. Sit and wait it out. You might see nothing, but you might also have the sighting of a lifetime!”
“Love every bit of magic nature might throw at you and stop to smell the roses. I am by trade, an avid cat-lover, but always also make time for the little things.”
With extremely tough skin, honey badger is still difficult to swallow for the Nile crocodile in Kruger Park even when dead.
Photographer Sheila Grobbelaar caught a Nile crocodile eating a honey badger while on safari in Kruger National Park in South Africa earlier this year, according to Earth Touch News. At first, Grobbelaar noticed the crocodile struggling in the shallows and thought it had just caught a large catfish.
Usually, crocodiles satisfy their hunger with fish, birds, toads and anything they can easily find underwater. However, they certainly did not ignore larger prey carelessly approaching the water’s edge. As the crocodile rose, Grobbelaar saw its prey clearly in its teeth. “I was horrified when I saw an alligator start tossing a honey badger. I love badgers so it wasn’t pleasant at all,” Grobbelaar said.
Grobbelaar spent an hour tracking and photographing the crocodile as it tossed badger honey from side to side in an attempt to shred its prey into smaller, easier-to-chew pieces. When Grobbelaar returned to the lagoon about half an hour later, the alligator had left the water and crawled along the riverbank with the badger carcass.
Maybe the crocodile saved the meal to eat the carcass because the carcass appeared to be fresh. But even so, this is still a difficult meal to swallow. “I suspect the reason the crocodile lost so much food to the badger carcass was because it had a hard time tearing the carcass into bite-sized pieces,” explains crocodile expert Dr Xander Combrink. Crocodiles can’t chew food, so they have to break up the meat before swallowing and use stomach acid to digest the meal.
According to Dr. Combrink, honey badgers are known for their extremely tough skin. The weight of the killed honey badger was too light to create enough resistance to help the crocodile tear its prey by flinging it across the water.