Bushcraft
Some Thoughts on how Weather Affects
Behaviour of the Hunter and the Hunted
By I J Larivers
E
veryone who ventures into the bush, whether they
are hunters or not, is interested in learning more
about nature’s habitats and developing a better
understanding of the wild. Animal behaviour is a big part of
the picture, especially to a hunter in search of quarry.
Hunters coming from Europe and North America tend
to think of Africa’s climate as being moderate, with few
extremes, but in actual fact nothing could be further from the
truth. Africa’s diverse topography is a recipe for extremes
- in temperature, rainfall, and wind currents, resulting in
myriad diverse habitats and ecosystems. African climate
ranges from tropical to subarctic in the highest montane
regions. North Africa is primarily arid desert, which gives
way to savanna plains and dense jungle in the central
and southern regions. The fluctuating movement of the
intertropical convergence zone, also known as the monsoon
trough, determines the rainy seasons across central portions
of the continent to the south of the Sahara. When I worked
briefly in the Central African Republic many years ago,
we used to joke that the dry season was October the 17th,
between 14.00 and 15.30, A number of tropical cyclones hit
the African coast off of the Atlantic ocean every year as a
result of the easterly jet-stream, and while the Sahara is the
hottest and driest portion of Africa it can be bitterly cold at
night.
While game species have evolved over millions of years
into their respective ecological niches, they are still very
susceptible to seasonal and otherwise unusual variations in
their ambient environment.
What form interaction of a particular species with man
takes can be looked at as a backdrop. If an animal species
realizes that it can find adequate food and shelter in the
presence of man, it will become habituated because it can
satisfy its survival needs with less of an energy expenditure
than if it had to evade human predators. Sadly, in Africa this
rarely occurs. Taking man out of the equation, a species’
place on the food chain is significant - for example small
mammals that are low down are often nocturnal so that
they can move about with less chance of being seen. And
this, of course gives rise to a cadre of specialised nocturnal
predators.
Temperature obviously affects animal behaviour too.
In the tropics, where it is simply too hot in the daytime
and there is little shelter, grazers on the African plains will
usually cease activity during peak temperature periods,
resting under a tree and moving as little as possible. For
African Hunter Vol. 19 No. 4
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this reason, their predators also tend to rest during the dayit takes up too much energy trying to hunt. These animals
exhibit crepuscular behaviour and are therefore normally
active at dawn or dusk, as there is enough light to detect
danger, but they can also feed when it is cooler, as heat
(and therefore water loss through sweating etc) is not such
a problem.
Looking at temperature more closely, extremes
are excessive heat (hyperthermia) and excessive cold
(hypothermia). We tend to colloquially group animals as
either “cold blooded”, such as reptiles, or “warm blooded”,
such as mammals. These terms are fundamentally misleading,
as the complex physiology that takes place in living cells,
which we call life, is pretty much the same for both types
of animal, and occurs at peak efficiency - in most cases -
Illustration by Katey D. Glunt,
Justine I. Blanford, Krijn P. Paaijmans
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