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Head-on with a Sable antelope – Featured Blog

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Today’s posts from our featured Port Elizabeth Blogger:

Head-on with a Sable antelope:

Mount Camdeboo Game Reserve outside Graaff-Reinet has a Sable antelope breeding program and while on the game drive we stopped next to the camp for a closer look.  This young male came walking towards the fence and stood still watching us long enough for me to get a nice head-on photo of him.  Just a pity for the fence wires in between.
Some info about the Sable courtesy of Wikipedia:
The sable antelope (Hippotragus niger) is an antelope which inhabits wooded savannah in East Africa south of Kenya, and in Southern Africa.

The sable antelope is sexually dimorphic, with the male heavier and about one-fifth taller than the female. The head-and-body length is typically between 190 and 255 cm.  Males reach about 117–140 cm at the shoulder, while females are slightly shorter. Males typically weigh 235 kg and females 220 kg. The tail is 40–75 cm long, with a tuft at the end.

Sable antelope live in savanna woodlands and grasslands during the dry season, where they eat mid-length grasses and leaves. They visit salt licks and have been known to chew bones to collect minerals. They are diurnal, but are less active during the heat of the day. They form herds of 10 to 30 females and calves led by a single male, called a bull. Males fight among themselves; they drop to their knees and use their horns.

Source: Firefly The Travel Guy.

When a game ranger goes above and beyond:

A lot of people have the policy that if you want something done you have to do it yourself, especially if you don’t really have anybody to delegate to.  But even then you need somebody to push a rock out of the way for you every now and then.  I had a funny “push a rock out the way” moment on a game drive at Mount Camdeboo Game Reserve outside Graaff-Reinet the other day.  We weer driving up the mountain when we found this boulder lying in the road.  The ranger immediately hopped out to roll it out the way and clearly underestimated its weight… or his own strength, because it just did not budge.  Perhaps it was the rocky equivalent of Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer, and nobody can move it no matter how hard you try.  Oh well, if you can’t get it out the way then you just drive around it like we did.

Source: Firefly The Travel Guy.

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Port Elizabethan

This author is a 'catch-all' for occasional articles and letters written to MyPE. The Author of each article can be found in the signature at the bottom of each individual article.