Many people can remember being a small child and hugging the wrong adult’s legs in a shop, thinking they belonged to Mom or Dad.
In this sighting, a baby wildebeest made a similar mistake. Having wandered from the herd, he took to a blue car, believing it to be his mother.
Watch The Sighting:
Wildebeest Calf Takes A Liking To Blue Car
Zaheer explained how it all began. He said they were traveling up to Mata Mata, one of the camps, when they turned a corner and came across the little wildebeest calling out to his Mom and standing next to the car in front of them.
They noticed that the little animal started walking when the car started moving, and stayed still when the car stopped.
“At first, we didn’t understand what was happening, but after a few minutes of viewing the wildebeest, checking our surroundings and seeing that there wasn’t a herd in sight, we realised that he was probably lost and he had taken to the car in front of us as though it were its mother”, Zaheer said.
Wildebeest Moves In Sync With Car
The poignant moment saw the tiny thing trotting alongside the car. Perhaps the vehicle looked big and protective, and appeared to offer the same protection as Mom did.
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Of course, the blue car looked nothing like his real mother. The small straggler somehow felt comfortable and less alone with the car at his side.
While the car didn’t have any horns to protect the baby as his real mother did, it did have a hooter and a noisy engine. It was also really big, as the baby wildebeest knew his mother to be.
Zaheer believed the calf was acting on instinct. “We knew it was a natural instinct for him to follow the biggest moving object closest to him, as he would have done in the herd,” he said. “We were afraid for him as he was all alone and vulnerable in lion and cheetah territory, and our aim was to help him back to the safety of his herd.”
He said that at the same time, he and Asma realised they were witnessing something spectacular… ‘Something you would usually only see on TV,’ in his words.
Calf Decides To Follow Another Car
They followed the calf and the blue car for about 2km. This was when the calf decided to follow another car that was passing in the opposite direction. The calf was vulnerable and almost got run over as it dashed across the road. “Luckily, the ABS on the Toyota was better than that on the little calf,” he says. “He went flying into the car but luckily was not injured.”
The calf was getting a little hungry by this stage, and he turned to Zaheer’s car and even went to one of the tyres to suckle.
A Successful Mission To Find Real Wildebeest Mom
Seeing the calf attempt to suckle on his tire, Zaheer spoke of how his heart was moved, and he knew it was time for him to try and help the calf find his real mom.
“We moved the vehicle forward, hoping it would start following us,” he said. “We drove for about another 4-5km like this in search of a herd of wildebeest. The whole way he was crying out for us to stop.”
Eventually, they spotted a herd of about 50 wildebeest in the distance. Among them was the calf’s real mom.
It only took a few moments for the mother wildebeest to stop her calf, and she came running towards him, and they were reunited.
“He immediately started suckling on her,” says Zaheer. “What a pretty cool adventure we had!”
The innocence and beauty of the little guy and the childlike trust he showed in the blue car make this a sighting to be remembered.