Following the episode I narrated in the earlier post, after losing the second impala to the crocodiles, the painted dogs went back to the hill behind our camp and we did not see them again. This did not really matter to us as the action, as we expected, had now moved to the dam!
I had described earlier in a series of posts what happened at Masuma when the crocodiles catch one of the animals that come here to drink [1]. We did not need to wait for too long for the battle between crocs and hippos to begin.
As soon as the roughly twenty hippos at the dam detected the crocs with their prey, two groups were formed by those interested in fresh meat. They seemed to have decided to tackle a dead impala each. The crocs that held them had been seen earlier doing the classical spinning maneuver, which is known as the “death roll’ a violent rotation on the longitudinal axis of the body to break their prey into pieces that they can then swallow.
The crocodiles faced a massive challenge when the hippos got into contact with them and tugs of war followed that were partly responsible for tearing the impala carcasses to be shared between reptiles and mammals.
Lot of agitation took place while hippos and crocs tugged at the impala carcasses. Joseph Dudley (pers. comm.) had told me that he believed that, although hippos would eat meat, they were probably unable to open the carcass themselves as their mouths are not good for this task (they do not seem to be too suited to grazing either!).
Hippos of different ages were observed eating various soft tissues and also attempting to eat the impala legs, I believe, without luck.
I end with three videos showing some of the action we witnessed.
[1] https://bushsnob.com/2015/12/10/a-new-hippo/
https://bushsnob.com/2015/03/23/hippos-from-hell-the-videos/
A Bushsnob out of Africa 