The Birth of a (very small) Hippo

I have just been watching some incredible video footage by my friend Karen Paolillo of the Turgwe Hippo Trust. The video shows the antics of a very newborn hippo and its mother – video footage that has probably not been seen before, I never have.

Karen single-handedly saved a pod of hippo during the 1992 drought in Zimbabwe, and since then she has become a bit of a 'hippo whisperer'. My first experiences of Africa was with Karen when I went to stay with her for five days, my first five days in the African bush. I was very naive, but those five days taught me a lot about Africa, the wildlife and how to survive in the African bush. Karen's house is very rustic, is in the middle of nowhere and wildlife has the right of way. There were warthogs near the back door, monkeys sitting on the roof, Mozambique spitting cobras in a number of places around the house and kudu browsing on the nearby trees. It was like being in a ground-based Noah's Ark. I learnt how to track animals in the bush, how to watch hippos from a safe distance and how to avoid a charging elephant. It was stuff that dreams are made of.

The melodious sounds of honking hippos to me is the essence of Africa.