Largest Uganda Cape Buffalo in 35 Years
Largest Uganda Cape Buffalo In 35 Years
A photo of the largest cape buffalo taken in Uganda since Idi Amin was ousted from power and one of the very best taken in East Africa in recent years.
It was a solitary and hard bossed old bull with horns almost 49 inches wide.The buffalo was taken at Lake Kacheera just south of Lake Mburo National Park.
The safari was organized by Astrid and Ted Gorsline. Astrid Gorline has organized more than 10,000 African safaris in the past 30 years.
Ted Gorsline is a former Toronto Sun outdoor columnist who has been working as a professional hunter in Africa for more than 22 years. He was the founder of Kilombero North Safaris in Tanzania and his clients have taken more than 500 adult cape buffalo bulls and several dozen big cats. Mostly lions.
For more details about hunting in every African country where hunting is both legal and possible they can be contacted at: asted@freenet.de
Dear Bill,
Uganda has just suspended sport hunting in most areas in Uganda but not at Lake Mburo where the above buffalo was shot. There are so many buffalo at Lake Mburo now that the buffalo are spilling out onto the surrounding farms.
Dear bill,
Recently a hunting ban was announced in Uganda. There is no general ban but a couple of areas have been placed on hold.
Its not that there haven’t been growing pains in Uganda. There have. A South African outfitter was shooting sitatunga on the Sesse Island with dogs which is illegal. One of his clients who did this was a famous Canadian hunting show personality.
At the moment an area in Karamojo has been put on hold. I am told the problems there is shooting buffalo up to the edge of a national park which is really poaching because the buffer areas around the national parks are as protected as the national parks.
Kaka Matama and Nicky Blunt, both of whom used to work for Uganda safaris before Amin came to power, are two the few people who seem to know what the game laws are.
Kaka says there is a two mile buffer zone around Kidepo National Park. I talked to a game warden who just came from there and he said the game scouts who accompany the safaris take GPS readings of the locations of all the animals shot.
What this means is any American client who shot a buffalo beside the park in a protected area is already cooked because they will now be charged and convicted under the Lacey Act. The US F&W Servise does enforce the law.
The arrests are normally made at the SCI convention in Reno or Los Vegas and the people charged are hauled away in handcuffs.
Stay tuned.
Ted – my discussion forums page is almost ready…thx for the suggestion.
The Liberal Party’s leader Ignatiev just said the comments by the director of CSIS regarding Chicom political intervention in Canada are nonsense.
He made the announcement in U of Toronto’s Munk Center and was quoted in today’s National post.
Both the announcement and the precise location show the heart and soul of the Federal Liberal Party is still in bed with serious organized crime, more specifically the head of the 14-K Triad, the Chicoms and the deciples of the late Myer Lansky, head of Murder Incorporated, whose tentacles have been embedded in a Liberal PM’s office before.
This is where the Liberals will get their re-election money and it will be substantial. They will have lots of money to buy the publicity machine. Despite the predictions Harper could well lose.
I’d like to think Ignatiev doesn’t know where his money will come from but I find it impossible to believe that he is as ignorant or stupid as this would imply.
Punch RCMP/CSIS/Sidewinder into your computer.
Its very important top get rid of the gun registry and give the money to the RCMP to seriously fight organized crime at the top in Canada. I believe organized crime already owns Canada due to the Federal Liberal Party of Canada.
Dear Bill,
I was just in Kampala and you canot help but notice Chicoms everywhere. There are nopw at least 100,000 Chicom soldiers guarding oil wells in the Sudan.
I asked a local Africa guy about how the Chicoms work because he has done business with them.
Apparentl China is now producing 30 million univertiy graduates a year and is using them to expand Chicom control world wide.
My Ugandan friend say China sends them to Africa to set up businesses with African partners. The idea is to see what businesses are there and to learn exactly how they work. Once the chinese immigrants learn the langauge and the ropes they get rid of their African partners and take over that part of the Uganda economy themselves.
Its easy for them to do this because they do not have to make money. They are subsidized by the Chicom government until they take control of that aspect of the Ugandan economy and they get business contracts and keep their residency permits by bribing local politicians.
The Chicom government pays the bribes. This is how Red China gets its foot in the door in Africa. I would not be suprised to find they are doing the same thing in Canada.
My friends in Uganda tell me the IFAW have set up shop in Uganda. This is not good news.
I believe they are worse than useless. Kenya has been in their hands for a very long time and during that time it has suffered the most catastrophic loss of wildlife in world history.
But this decline is good for fund raising. The IFAW advertises (likely for free) on CNN saying Kenya is a mess, send us money and we will save Kenya.
I believe that they and their kind ARE the problem in Kenya.
The detruction of Kenya’s wildlife can be dated with the closure of big game hunting for sport. Jomo Kenyatta closed hunting and pulled the professional hunters out of the field (they were all honorary game wardens) so his daughter Margaret could organize elephant poaching with impunity. Ian Parker doucumented this.
The IFAW moved in and developed a co$y relationship with Kenya politicians. Richard Leakey burned a few elephant tusks. Everything has been downhill since then. Most of Kenya’s wildife is now gone. Zimbabwe which promoted regulated hunting elephants for sport during the same period still has elephants coming out its ears despite poor governance.
The Kenya branch of IFAW which has often been funded by Injection mould maker Robert Schad in conjunction with the government of Red China.
Strange mix. A little know fact about Red Chinma is that when the CHicoms came to power Mao tse Tung ordered the death not only of 60 million political prisoners but also all of the birds in China.
The IFAW was started in Canada by Brian Davies who fled Canada in a hurry when it was discovered he had put the IFAW helicopter into his own name as his own property which was a no no. This was in the TO Star in an article by Brian Vallee.
Davies then set up shop in the USA and later sold the IFAW name in Britain for at least US $1 million. This was documented in the British papers. He cashed in big time with the IFAW.
Its strange that Robert Schad has funded IFAW in Kenya along with with the Chicoms although he did have investments in China and birds of a feather stick together which may explain his role.
Dear Bill,
My friends in Uganda have been looking for the above mentioned old buffalo bull for about six weeks now and he has vanished into the rolling blue hills of Africa. He is just a memory now.
A really frightened buffalo bull will try to hole up and hide in very dense cover on the day he was shot at and then when darkness falls he will put miles and miles of country between him and the place where he was frightened.
If he is injured he will frequently wait for you. Its common to track them for hours and to find them dead facing their back trail.
Its the ones that get away that you remember. Many years ago I was hunting the Stoney Indian Reserve in Alberta with Ted Powderface and a huge white-tail buck jumped up about 20 yards away from us.
I was stunned by the size of his rack and too slow to shoot but I remember him as if it was yesterday and this happened 40 years ago.
Dear Bill,
Africans in Cameroun just killed their forth animal rights type woman. Her name was Ymke Warren,40, and she was British. She studied gorillas.
Others killed include Joy Adamson, Diane Fossey, and Joan Root.
Even the animals they purport to be saving don’t like them. Jane Goodall’s chimp “Frodo” recently beat her up. She won’t go near him without an armed guard.
The spin portrayed of white western animal rights women and developed by the western TV and MSM writers such as as Farley Mowat bears no relationship whatsoever as to how they are regarded in Africa by Africans.
Part of the problem is that women are still regarded as chattels in Africa. They are bought an sold. A wife in Masailand now costs 4 cows and you can buy a poor cow for $40. I have bought a few. So a woman is worth about $160.
So when a white woman steps off the plane in Africa and begins bitching in an attempt to ban the locals from doing what they have been doing since the beginning of time (eating apes) her days are numbered.
Except for photo ops Jane Goodall spends next to no time in Africa these days and is mostly on the road flogging books. Under the circumstances its probably the safest thing for her to do.
I hope the massive beast does not evade you for too long Ted.
Dear Bill,
The Ph Briane Herne (Jane Goodall’s old flame)who hunted Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in the old days said the largest buffalo he ever saw in Africa were near Lake Mburo in Uganda.
The bull in the photo above came from there and to be more specific from near Lake Kacheera which is right beside Lake Mburo.
Two weeks in mid May ago I saw a French client miss a buffalo which I estimate to be about 54 inches wide or much larger than the bull in the photo above.
I now feel fairly safe in saying the widest buffalo in Africa are either in Masailand near Tarangire Park in Tanzania or near Lake Mburo in Uganda.
Going back to look for the old boy above and hopefully will find him before he dies of old age. He is an ancient buffalo and heavy in the boss and horn all the way to the tips.
Phillpipe Rosier’s Cannibal,
Dear Bill,
When I visited Isiro in the DR Congo a few years ago I met Phillipe Rosier, the oldest white man still living there. He is a Belgian and a good mechanic and he works at a mission station.
His cook is a convited cannibal. Cannibalism is not frowned upon in some quarters in the Congo but murder is and where many cannibals slip up is that they kill a victim. If they just dug up graves the police would probably leave them alone.
Mr Rosier’s cook was one such person and she was convicted and put in jail. The Congo prison system has no money so they rent their prisoners out as casual labour and that is how Phillpe got his budget cook.
She lived in his house and I asked him how he managed to sleep at night. Phillipe said she was not a problem as long as you kept her well fed.
The meal that night was white tree slugs but I didn’t eat any. They looked like big white bloodsuckers to me and when I tried to pick one up the damm thing bit me.
Not everybody in the Congo favors cannibalism however. When I was in Isiro there was a protest parade organized by two missionaries from Quebec.
They had gathered 1,500 pigmys together to protest the fact general Bemba’s troops were eating them. This is a true story and the UN followed up on it. Its on the net.
Not only did I see the protest myself but I talked to the brother-in-law of one of General Bemba’s cannibals. He said what happened is this.
Bemba’s troops had no money and no food so they sent some pygmies into the forest to hunt monkies. The pygmie returned empty handed so the troop ate the pygmies instead of the monkies.
This is a true story. General Bemba has been arrested and is being held bya the UN for war crimes so this will eventually all come out in thew wash but you read it first in Muskoka Outdoors.
Dear Bill,
This is not about Africa but it is dear to my heart. Organized shooters (the NRA), in the Liberal heartland of Massachusetts, have just elected pro hunter and shooter Scott Brown to the Senate and devastated the anti-gun, anti-hunting crowd.
This is the end of the Kennedy dynasty.
It was just one more example in the hundreds of overwhemlming NRA victories. The Obama bin Biden anti-gun agenda is now in serious trouble.
There is huge latent political energy in Canada waiting to be harnessed if all the “big frog in a little pond” bickering can be overcome.
By immitating the NRA, step by step, Canada’s organized shooters and hunters can very easily take political control of Canada.
Just copy the NRA tactics. Look for anti-hunting and anti-gun politicians in swing (close vote) ridings, raise money at auctions at the 2,000 rod and gun clubs across the country, and then use the money for TV ads and fliers that gun club members can distribute door to door.
Don’t waste your money and energy fighting politicians that you don’t like but who are in a very strong position.
Copy Robert Schad’s animal rights tactics and focus on swing ridings. Robert Schad’s victory in stopping tbe spring bear hunt shows that it works but now he has let the genie is out of the bottle for all to see and it can be used against him.
The anti-gun and animal rights people just don’t have numbers and the votes. They live in a house of cards. They get mainstream media support because they are willing to make fools of themselves in public, such as taking off their clothes on TV, but Canadian mainstream media is dying. The internet is taking charge.
I can smell the blood. I hope Canada’s organized hunters and shooters can too.
Sounds like something you might read in one of the one minute mystery books. That is an intriguing scenario. Good day to be a lion!
A Natural History Mystery
Dear Bill,
Here is a natural history mystery which I cannot explain nor have I met anyone else who has an answer.
Sometimes, in Africa, you find hippo tracks leading to the water, and then see lion tracks joining the hippo tracks.
The tracks travel together for 50 to 100 yards and then you start finding pools of blood on the ground.
That means lions have jumped the hippo. Both hippos and lions feed mostly at night so these battles are seldom witnessed. I have spent years in lion country in a tent but and never seen anything but the aftermath.
Hippo’s have skin an inch thick on their backs. It is so tough that
hyaenas, which have the strongest jaws in the bush, cannot bite through it until it rots. Big crocs can’t bite through it either. Their teeth just leave superficial grooves in the skin.
Most of the time when lions attack a hippo the blood trail leads straight into a river and the hippo escapes leaving the lions sitting on the bank. But not always. Sometime lions kill very large hippos and even elephants weighing up to 5,000 pounds.
One day I was hunting lions with a Russian and we saw vultures descending into long grass about half a mile away. They were not roosting nor were they riding thermals which meant they were dropping on to a kill.
We went for a look and found a dead hippo bull. He was a young male and had not yet been in any fights over cows because he carried no scars but he was still very large. He must have weighed at least 3,000 pounds and he was about 12 feet long.
The tracks showed two large male lions had killed him.
The kill was so fresh that blood was still trickling out of superficial wounds on his back but the hippo had no serious wounds.
His neck was at least five feet in circumfernece and the lions could not have grabbed him by the wind pipe, likes they do with antelope, even if they had wanted to.
We waited at carcass and when the lions returned the Russian shot one and another client shot the other. The yellow teeth of one lion were worn to nubbins. The other was missing one eye and both of his lower fangs had broken off but both cats were in good condition.
These toothless old cats had killed a hippo bull without inflicting a single serious wound on him.
I don’t know how they did it. I can only speculate that they panicked the hippo by biting him on the back, got him running blindly forward, and then tripped him thus breaking his neck with his own momentum. Otherwise I can’t imagine how they did it?
That IS an Intriguing story! I have to visit Africa someday…Thanks.
Dear Bill,
Here is an interesting little African mystery story about missing ivory, and about the second largest elephant tusks ever to come from Africa.
The largest ever tusks came from an elephant killed by a slave named Shunti at the base of Kibo (Mount Kilimanjaro) in 1898. They are in the British Museum. The heaviest tusk weighed 226 pounds and the other a bit less.
The largest in the last sixty years was taken by a client of my wife and they weighed 154 pounds pers side.
The second largest ever was poached in the Iringa Region of Tanzania by a policeman and they were seized by the game department.
The tusks were in the old Ivory Room in Tanzania for many years but eventually they were sent to a Game Fair in Budapest Hungary during the cold war.
The man whos sent them was Count Nagy, the man who created Mweka Wildlife college, in Tanzania.
The count was a no account count. An old man named Arno Hacker, who knew him well, told me that after the war, Count Nagy got a good lawyer and sued the German government for 12 million D-Marks to replace his stolen art collection.
He won his case, moved to Tanzania and bought property there which he later donated to create Mweka Wildlife College.
Arno Hacker told me there never was any art collection in the count’s castle. The count’s post war fortune was built on fraud.
The count then took these enormous tusks to Hungary for a hunting exposition at the time when it was still a communist country and there were no CITES worries.
They were never returned to Tanzania.
My guess is that they have either been cut up and sold in China or else they are, to this very day, sitting in the basement of a castle on the shores of Lake Bellaton in Hungary.
Dear Bill,
RIP – Anton Turnmer – An Officer and a Gentleman
In the past few months elephants in East Africa have gored at least five people. I knew three of them. Most recently an elephant in Kenya killed a mother and her baby in a national park. No one had a gun.
Before that an ele ambushed and killed Godson Sataibu whom I once met in the Selous Game Reserve but did not know. Another gored the Kenya hunter Nigel Archer who I know well and with whom I have shared many a campfire, and yet another killed Anton Turner who once lived in my house in Dar es Salaam.
Anton was making a childrens film with a BBC crew. They were tracing David Livingston’s footsteps in Tanzania with a group of children. There is lots of stuff about this on the web – just punch in Anton Turner – elephant – BBC.
Anton was an officer and a gentleman. He was a graduate of Sandhurst and a captain in the British army by the time he was 24. He led a column of British tanks in the first Iraq war.
He was intelligent, brave, disciplined, personable and fit. He had a set of weights at the house and he worked out on them diligently. He was the right stuff.
But if he had one minor hick up it was the desire to be on center stage and that likely drew him to the BBC and to his death.
He showed up at my camp on the Upper Mnyera River one day and said he wanted to become a professional hunter. I didn’t know who he was but at that time – likely 2005 – he seemed to have no experience with large game. He was foolish.
He went down to the ferry dock, jumped in the river, and swam across to the other side – a distance of maybe 35 yards. He was lucky to get there. I had just shot a 14.5 foot croc there the week before. Had the croc been alive when Anton jumped in the river Anton would have had a very tight swimming race on his hands. He did not know I had shot the croc nor did he ask about them.
Anton just did not seem to know the river was full of monsters or maybe he did and he was just showing off. But he simply walked up to the bank, looked left and right, as if he were crossing a city street and then he dove in and swam across. That time he got away with it but many people do not because a croc can sit on the river bottom for hours at a time without coming up to breath and you never know they are there.
Anton was proud of what he had done and made a point of telling me thinking I would compliment him. Instead I gave him a tongue lashing because of the problems it would have caused for me had he been eaten by a croc. Lots of paper work and a messy job recovering the bits and pieces.
But that was Anton. He came from the “he who dares wins” school of thought. So when I read that he had been killed by an ele I was not suprised.
The BBC spin emphasized that he was an extremely capable guy around big game. To do otherwise would would be to admit they had made a mistake sending young children out with Anton.
I have no idea how much experiece Anton got with large game between 2005 and the day he was killed but I doubt if he had ever done any elephant hunting. The single most important thing to know around eles is their anatomy so you can dump them on their butts if need be.
I have read that he did not fire a shot and I have also read that he that he did shoot but missed. I do not know which version is true.
I suspect he tried to shout the ele down for fear of being filmed on camera killing an ele on a kids TV show. Its not the kind of thing the BBC likes to admit to doing.
Moms would rather have their young kids see muppets instead of blood.
In fact you can usually shout eles down and they just about always stop in their tracks if you put a bullet through one outstretched ear. I have done both.
I think the problem lies with the BBC. If you are going to send little kids out amongst the eles for filming you can’t be silly about it. You must have a real elephant hunter like Luke Samaras standing by just off camera.
Luke has dumped dozens of charging eles on their butt without ever blinking an eye lash. Its a simple reflex with Luke.
I am sure that if Luke had been with the crew Anton would be alive today. Anton was a “crocodile hunter” in waiting and would have been perfect for the job but I also think he likely overemphasized his experience when he approached the BBC to get his movie break and that likely is what cost him his life.
That is a creepy story. For the sake of Candian Soldiers I hope its NOT true.
Dear Bill,
Here is an interesting Canada-Africa story that you will not read in Canadian mainstream media. I don’t know if it is true and can only give the source and relate what I was told.
During the Rhodesian bush war Ian Smith had a unit called the Selous Scouts. Most of them were black but they are usually thought of as a white unit.
I know some of them because many became professonal hunters after the war.
One was Ian Lennox. Ian died a few years ago fron a heart attack in Botswana. He had been hunting elephants for Johann Calitz. He told me he was married to a Canadian girl.
I spent an evening drinking with Ian in Arusha. I wanted to find out about a Chinese Canadian guy who claimed to have been working for Joshua Nkomo.
Ian knew the guy and said his war stories were pure BS. He said this chap had been in Zimbabwe posing as a martial arts expert but had left the country in embarassment after the son-in- law of a man named Buck DuFries called his bluff and beat the daylights out of him.
I was told Ian had a head injury and when he got drunk he got aggressive and it wa strue. He was pleasnat while sober but eventually he began to rant and rave and finally he staggered off into the night.
But before he left he told me that he was once given the task of killing all the Canadian Peace Keepers that Trudeau sent to Zimbabwe to help Robert Mugabe. Maybe he was just trying to wind me up but he sounded sincere and knew all the little details of the operation which I now forget.
The idea was to send the Canada peace keepers home in body bags to make things politically embarassing for Pierre Trueau.
Ian said he and his fellow scouts mapped out the sleeping locations of all the Canadian Peace Keepers. They knew exactly where they were and when they were most vulnerable to suprise attack.
He said they were within hours of cutting the throats of all the Canadians when he was told to stop the operation.
Ian said some kind of deal had been made between the head of the Rhodesian army and Robert Mugabe. I have no idea if any of this is true or if it was drunken blather but there are still people out there such as Ian’s wife and other Selous Scouts who will know the truth.
Dear Bill,
I will try to keep this blog spot updated with African hunting news from our contacts there. For example, a very good old friend just left for Isiro in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today.
He is 85, has one eye, wears an eyepatch and a monocle on his good eye. He has one useable arm (the other having rotted off in the jungle as a result of snake bite)a steel hip, a heart by pass and an electronic device that keeps his heart beating.
He should not go to this part of the world in this condition but the vast and still unexplored jungles of the NE Congo are where he had his fun as a young man and so he wants to go home.
Isiro is the home of the Wild Geese and my friend had a coffee plantation there for many years. He has sent me many photos of himself sitting around the dinner table with Mad Mike Hoare making plans to put the lid on Che Gueverra who was uppity in those days.
He owns a very stately old colonial home in Isiro, has an African wife and family, and speaks all the local dialects including Lingala. His information is better and far more accurate than mainstream media.
Because he is frail I did a game survey for him on the Bomokandi River three years ago and found elephant, buffalo, waterbuck, hipppo, crocs but only after walking for ten hours directly off what had been the main highway 50 years ago.
My African companions taught me how to sleep in the rainforest without tents, mosquito nets, sleeping bags beds or anything at all.
The trick is to smoke the large fan like leaves that are common under the forest canopy.
Insects are afraid of fire and the smell of smoke and so when you lay the leaves smoked side down they walk around the leaves.
Then you find dead palm fronds in the swamp forest and split them open. The dry insides makes as good a fire starter as birch bark.
The very dense hardwood trees in the forest give off great heat and you use fallen hardwood logs for the fire. They last forever. Then you just curl up like dogs on the smoked leaves around the fire.
The intense hardwood heat keeps you from getting hypothermia. You are soaking wet but very hot on one side like a grilled sausage.
I didn’t sleep well but my companions, who were at least half pygmy, were snoring soundly even when the rain was pouring down on them. They were used to it.
The foret is a lovely place and the air is thick like jelly with pollen and the lovely smell of blooming flowers and orchids.
There is to this day a vast swamp near the Bomakandi River where no white man has ever been. I have a map of it in front of me here as I type and I see the swamp is 1,000 KM (600 miles) long.
The Africans talk about a mythical creatures in the Congo swamps and forests called “the father of the rainbow.”
I have no idea what “the father of the rainbow” is but I do know the local people will not allow anyone to venture into the country where it lives because they say it kills people. Likely its just a myth but you never know.
Not far away near the town of Bili a photographer named Karl Amman recently brought attention to some man-sized chimpanzees that look exactly like what a Sasquatch is supposed to look like – and they are for real.
The National Geographioc Society called it a new discovery but in fact they have been know to elephant hunters in the Congo for a century and several skulls have been in an African museum in Brussels for at least 50 years.
Intriguing place.