Our app receives many tings from parks and reserves around Africa, daily. Keeping our community engaged with sightings in real-time is important to us. One of our more recent tings was of a warthog that tries to intimidate a buffalo over the last drop of water in a waterhole! This incredible sighting occurred on the S98, near Punda Maria in the Kruger National Park and was uploaded to our app by RogerNLD.
Summer is fast approaching the Kruger National Park bushveld and what a wonderful time of year it is! In this part of the world, summer brings rain, which transforms the drab winter flora into a lush mass of life. This transition has a notable effect on animal behaviour, daily patterns of movement and territory or home range.
Towards the end of the dry winter season, animals’ movements are dictated by the availability of food and water. They often have to move much further than they would in the wet summer season to satisfy their hunger and thirst. Grazing, browsing, and water availability limit their movements so much that patterns of movement become very predictable to both humans and predators. Watering bodies that last deep into winter naturally become the busiest and often lead to competition over this scarce resource.
“A lot of animals visit this waterhole on the S98, however, it is almost completely dry. At one point a troop of baboons came down to drink, and one of the females lifted a rock out of the waterhole as if to show the rest there’s not even water under the rock.”
This buffalo and warthog were posturing over the last drops of water and despite the warthog’s attempts at intimidating the buffalo, the buffalo was victorious. The poor warthog had to retreat without quenching its thirst.