BIG 5 ! They hunt the hunters. - Schotia Safaris - Ep274

this has to be up there with one of the the most incredible experiences in my life hello and welcome to Grizzly and bear Overland in South Africa with Lee and Stephy this is a special episode at scosa Safaris where we were invited by our friend Justin and his family we were very fortunate to be able to camp on the property [Music] that first afternoon Justin took us on a tour in his own Land Rover Defender one30 the land is so beautiful and somehow reminds us of Australia except for a few little

details no kangaroos here Nala n y a l a they are in the same family as kudu Talus family a spiral horned Antelope Zulus believe that life was br breathed in to theala by a guard that held them by the face so if you look at his face there's a white sort of marking over the nose yes over where the God's thumbs held [Music] him but when you see them fight they sort of remind me of a Spanish bull you know the El their horn shape and the way they behave and yeah very brutal yeah this is a Scotia la

tapia tree this particular one you can see has been destroyed by the elephant and the Bulls are obviously stronger bigger animals they'll break the tree down like this but then the rest of the herd will come along as well and the carves can access the leaves and the branches and all that they even eat the bark most of the tree they'll consume elephants right ahead wow so Nana he's 38 years old if I can remember correctly 38 yeah his name is Millennium he was born in the year 20 so that's just pl

ayful banter but quite often they will actually smell each other's mouths they'll stick the trunk right in the other one's mouth to smell what the other one has been consuming to find out if they can get some of that you know absolutely the record is 10.9 tons that's nearly double it's double what this guy is the ears are amazing it's only thin huh yeah very thin skin behind the ears particularly and you can actually see the veins there so of course that's how they'll cool down the blood that fl

ows through the brain and that's how their brain is kept cool and functioning correctly I mean they're difficult to see from this distance but their little hairs all over even though their skin is so thick and they walk through the most impenetrable thorny Bush and don't feel anything they can still feel a fly as long as a fly is touching one of their hairs they they can feel it you know in some places of Africa it's up to four years between CVS but with ours and with ad elephants next door beca

use the vegetation so good it's every 3 years they're having a cough yeah guys will stop drinking milk at what age like about a year old that one there is about a little bit less than a year that one's about 8 months but at about a year old yeah ah again see that rips it straight out with the foot hoof you call it a hoof just a foot yeah and then they have a pad okay and they actually walk on their toes and the bones are down like that so most of the weight is supported by the cushioning of the

pad under the foot there which it makes it so quiet when they walk as well because it absorbs a lot of the breaking sticks and stuff how much would they eat today uh so a six ton bull will eat up to 300 kg a day and and consume up to 150 L of water so off I went I got in the baky and I went to fetch the cold drinks came back took them off the baky and he said where were you I went to fetch the cold drinks ah no I took the buy like you said no man but you can't drive I can I just showed you I can

drive and you were how old 10 years old firstly I'll just like to say welcome again to Lee and Stephy Grizzly and bear coming to Scotia could have you guys here you can obviously pick up as I said before like-minded people and fun people to be around my name is Justin Bean uh part of the bean family and we live out at scoa Safaris private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape of South Africa it's about 30 minutes from Port Elizabeth it's a family Game Reserve I'll give you a little bit of the histor

y we arrived from England originally from suex it was the second wave of settlers that arrived in South Africa in the uh 1830s my family arrived in 1833 specifically and set up on this property and so now we're in the seventh generation of being on the land it was originally a cattle farm and my grandfather was the last generation to farm with cattle so my father was still very much involved with the cattle farming but he always dreamed of rewilding he always dreamt of having wild animals up on

the hill he would sit in the dairy and look out through the back door and and dream of having Eland right running across the hill in the distance so he set about contacting people he knew that were in the game industry and yeah started buying back uh species of game that belonged here even species that might not have belonged in this area specifically but in South Africa generally because you want to protect any South African animals with the diminishing habitat that's happening right now you wa

nt to be a safe haven for any species really for a while the wild animals would run alongside cattle my grandfather actually told him he was wasting his time with buck my boy as he said it and my dad said well okay let's compare how it goes we'll take this month and at the end of the month we can compare and see who does better the game drives or the dairy and at the end of the month my dad had doubled what my grandfather had made selling milk I think the word started spreading then amongst the

local people Port Elizabeth Port Elizabeth mainly eventually my grandfather sort of just let him take the RS and carry on with game farming and slowly but surely we phased out the cattle then in 1991 we built a beautiful lap a really big lap area a lap would be considered a place of eating African word I think it's Swahili for a place of eating around a fireplace but it's got reads around with a grass roof over it and at the time it was considered to be one of the largest in Africa it had 6 six

tons of fetch on the roof we could see 140 people under the roof and it's got big fireplaces in the middle and all that so that was really exciting soon after that we introduced lines as well uh but we set our lines free first in the cape Province to have free roaming lines meaning you could watch lies hunt for themselves in the K Province we get our name uh Scotia safaris from the beautiful big trees we have on the reserve they are scosa trees the common name for these trees is the Bo Bean or B

Bean if you translate that it means farmer bean and as I said our surname is Bean we were always Farmers so it was the perfect logo and name for us and then later on we changed from B Bean safaris to Scotia Safar so that's us in a big nutshell and they can also St oh I forget I forgot about these [Music] what a day has been and now we're going for dinner in the lap looks very tender going to sh the T thank you it's falling apart it looks so tender you guys enjoy thank you mhm we enjoyed a delic

ious dinner before returning to the car we're back home after like an incredible incredible day good night thank you 10: to 6:00 in the morning Justin said yeah no problem you can go for a run a rhinoceros has just blocked my path up ahead a rhinoceros yeah there's two of them there to that I can see this is something very very very special to be on foot and so close I'm going to uh head back to camp now I didn't quite do my morning run I was going to do because I just spend 15 20 minutes with t

he bloody rhinoceros right there insane later on that day Justin took us to our next camp where we will be spending our a second [Music] night second night on Justin's property and this is actually Lion's territory but he told us we can camp here possibly tonight if we need a midnight uh toilet break it's going to be happening in the Pea bottle inside the camper in Australia we call these things a double G they are a killer they'll go straight through a pair of thongs but yeah you definitely wou

ldn't be walking barefoot around here [Music] tonight we are going on a safari with the open vehicle that's so cool very very nice climbing in and we're going to check if we can see the lion [Music] so for the first week we tried to offer self drives MH and it didn't work so we closed that down and immediately started doing guided drives only we were the first to be crazy enough to get lines and then just let them run wild because we're a little bit cooler than the rest of Africa Lions can have

more hair and that's why they developed more hair was because it was cooler so yeah the cape [Music] [Music] lion he's coming quickly so I'm going to be ready to move if I have to it's unbelievable after this exceptional and surreal experience of having a lion running past the open vehicle Justin dropped us back to to our Grizzly and bear we've come back to Camp after the most incredible evening honestly it's been such a special experience to be here the BR on the go Stephie styling it up in the

avocado PJs smoke in the eyes absolute Hive of activity here at Scotia safaris today today we are joining a guided Safari tour with one of scotia's guide the famous and very knowledgeable Roger we will be with six other people in the Land Cruiser game viewing vehicle so yeah guys the most important thing is to is to be calm and relaxed okay if we get close to the animals please do not get scared okay enjoy the views let them come up smile at them and they'll smile back at you yeah anytime you'd

like to ask questions please feel free to ask uh almost one year in South Africa now really yeah we Bry often and we drink brandy and Coke look like a g you see his face oh I have to get this Brandy is it Brandy and C Brandy and C thank you very much you can't take him anywhere these are in gooni CS so remember of the gooni people which is the Zulu people Everyone is unique like got a marking like a fingerprint okay but the big guy in the middle is called an anoli yeah there's one female she's

got two babies there yeah they all natur occurring they move through under the fences and in and out all the time so you can't really control them and they are a prolific breeders I mean one female can have up to eight babies at a [Music] time so we took a chance and came up here and of course boom it perfect yeah once a male dominates a females then he normally stays with them okay he gets the choice of all the kills and everything that's the normal behavior but I him he's been more of a loner

than anything he spends a little bit of time with him then he goes off in his own so it's it's a strange Behavior but I mean it gets the stage where I think he gets so hungry that he actually kills for himself so he's managed but it's not ideal because a male um Main in that just makes him very obvious to be seen you know that male line was the most uh stubborn I've never seen a guy that feels so determined that he now knew there were water dogs in there he was so damn hungry the ladies lay over

there he literally I think it was for about 8 to 12 hours he dug and he dug and he dug and that is why the hole is three times the size cuz the females were Bor they were not even interested they were lying there and they like H we want waste our time he was throwing the clouds over us as he was digging eventually he succeeded and he pulled the pig out of there you know it was a big pig yeah so this is the youngest at the moment his name is obj he's around about 9 years old and then the a guy a

bove him a young boss he's 17 [Music] yeah [Music] here we go open open it open it yeah yeah you see those teeth see what they're doing is when by opening their mouth it's a it's a sign of like be careful it's a warning you know look at the size of my jaw yeah they have killed more people than anything else okay they don't they don't ask questions okay so this is the one animal that I genuinely I've got total respectful he's got teeth that up to 30 cm long top and bottom jaw every time he opens

and closes those teeth rub together so they razor sharp so that is his weapon so when he attacks he's got this huge jaw with that combination with those those slashes that's when you've got very little chance yeah so incredibly aggressive animal don't have any sebaceous glands like us so they have to remain in the water and that's why they only come out at night after the hippo this these are the guys that have killed second most amount of people he's a machine eh I mean look at the size of his

horns is about 50 in but he's very aggressive towards anything that comes near his females he's got a thing for the lion he just hates lions and he will kill a lion no [Music] problem [Music] their horns were ethically removed before they came here and that is to try and sort of give an inkling of a little bit of a hope that their poachers won't Target them for 15 years we had a pair of rhino called Bonnie and Cloud the poaches came in and shot and killed them and hacked their horns off with an

axe and got away so that is the sad reality of what's happening in in the east in 1520 years we may not have rhinos left this is a white rhino but the black rhino is even less the black rhino there's less than 6,000 of them left and there's just under 10,000 of these guys so it is a very scary reality check that we're facing horn grows back correct it does U horn will grow about 2 to 3 cm a year so it does grow back yeah it's keratin it's the same as our fingernails okay it has got no medicinal

value whatsoever it's hard to imagine that these guys are only a couple of weeks old and literally they were born in the beginning of the month and yet they're so agile it's incredible we had such a wonderful time once again and just before Sunset we made our way back to the lapa for dinner [Music] [Music] wonderful to see such a nice big group traveling out and visiting us this evening that was a very lovely evening with good company live music delicious food and even live art [Music] performan

ce we had a very special night at one of the amazing amazing scous Camp a real glamping experience in the middle of the reserve I'm the last day before leaving Justin took us on another Drive in a hope to see the buffal [Music] properly are you scared nervous uh that he would damage the car because he would damage the car you know like he just just said he could be 750 800 kilos and these guys are one off of the most dangerous animals in Africa and as you might know the big five is not the big f

ive because they're big they're the big five because they're the most dangerous when injured by hunters that's how they were labeled when Hunters were in Africa hunting the dangerous game the five most dangerous when injured would have been the big five and that's how they were labeled so a giraffe for example is not dangerous when it's injured by HED runs away and but Rhino elephant lion Buffalo a leopard will attack you and in fact of the five the Buffalo will often go downwind and try and sme

ll you out and then you know find the Hunter and hunt the hunter if I can put it that way they get very aggressive and [Music] dangerous [Music] perfect no problem M that was incredible thank you scusa safaris has definitely become one of our favorite places in South Africa we cannot thanks Justin his father Peter and all the family in enough we made some incredible memories to sherish forever thank you to all the amazing people supporting us on patreon thank you for watching we'll see you next

time for some more African Adventures until then take care bye-bye