Chapter 26: At the Going down Of the Sun
A foolproof barometer of the buffalo decline in Chirisa is trophy quality, in 2012 competent and experienced PHs were telling me how difficult it was to find a hard boss buffalo. And although I couldn’t confirm it, PH talk in the Chirisa had it that six back to back safaris had failed to find a hard boss buffalo. This too, was the first time I was hearing stories about clients leaving the Chirisa without having shot a trophy buffalo – in the 1990s and later, that was unheard of – the annual buffalo bull quota used to be 45, in 2012 it was 30.
Perhaps my sage tracker and bush wise colleague Barnabas Nyati put it best when he remarked to me as we sat high above the Sengwa River bemoaning the lack of game. ‘How can a father arrest his son or brother?’ – His implication being that the Zimbabwe Wildlife Authority’s practise of employing local tribesmen as game scouts was hugely flawed.
What also concerns me deeply from the long-term sustainability perspective, was that of recent I have also been getting told by PHs with both long time experience, integrity, and established client followings, that some young newly qualified PHs were being instructed by certain operators to get clients to shoot soft boss buffalo, on account of the hard boss bulls in their areas having all but been shot out. Failure to do this would mean being dismissed from employment. A young PH has to work extremely hard to establish a reputation and to build a client base and not many want to lose their job, so they comply with the instruction, the long-term losers being the buffalo because if it continues it won’t take long before the soft bossed buffalo are also no more.
Chapter 26: Photo Caption: A mere seven years on in 2012 the same Sipani springs – totally underutilized by wildlife due to heavily depleted populations, as compared to the 2005 photo – my trackers search for spoor in the far background centre.
