Page 35 - Blue Valley News 2 2021

NATURE

Panic Dam (looking through a window) illustrates
how green everything is this year

What also puzzles people is why, even in
times of drought when grazing is difficult to
find, zebras remain so fat. In fact, they all look
positively pregnant – including the males.
This is because their intestines are inflated
by gas - gas created by bacteria that thrive
on the half-digested grass that passes along
the zebra’s gut. Without these bacteria, zebras
would starve to death, for the microbes Each zebra’s patterning is unique
break down the fodder making the nutrients hooves and are known to have bitten a hyena it appeared he had killed a foal and was set
available to be digested. It’s what is known as to death. upon by several zebras and trampled and
a symbiotic relationship. bitten to death.
I remember Hilda Stevenson-Hamilton,
The zebra’s jaws and dental battery are widow of Colonel Stevenson-Hamilton, the One of the most pleasant calls in the bush is
formidable. I recall a zebra stuck in a deep first warden of Kruger Park. Her forearm was the gentle ‘bark’ of the Burchell’s zebra. Goss
mudhole. Its would-be rescuers were trying just skin on bone – no flesh at all. She had describes it as “Kwa-ha! Kwa-ha! Kwa –ha-ha-
to throw a loop around its neck but the zebra been bitten by her pet zebra. It was not an ha!”
foiled the plan by catching the rope in its affectionate bite!
teeth and refusing to let go. The rescuers then That’s how the name quagga arose. It was
found they were able to drag the animal clear Richard Goss who, in 1990, updated and the word the Hottentots used for the now-
merely by its teeth. expanded C Astley-Maberly’s Mammals extinct quagga that had stripes only on
of Southern Africa mentioned the finding its forequarters. Kwagga was the favoured
Zebras, in defending their young, have been of a poacher’s body “badly mutilated and Afrikaans word for zebra for many years. BV
known to fight off lions using their teeth and disabled”. From the spoor around the body

A foal knows its mother by her stripes
BLUE VALLEY NEWS • Issue 2 2021 • 33