The Lechwe (LECH-way)
I thought the TV show, “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”, was the bomb when I was a kid.
Long before the Crocodile Hunter or anyone else, Wild Kingdom’s host, Marlin Perkins, and his sidekick, Jim Fowler, travelled the world to highlight wildlife conservation issues. In the process, they’d catch and relocate rhinos, bears, jaguars, monkeys, mountain lions and all kinds of critters.
I always thought it was funny because Perkins was this professorial-looking guy who would do most of the narration while observing things from afar through binoculars. He’d get in the mix of things every now and again, but when it was time to jump out of the boat and wrestle the 15-foot anaconda, the younger and more physically gifted, Jim always got the call.
This last Sunday morning, I was watching backto- back classic Wild Kingdom episodes.
On one of the show segments, Jim took over narration duties for a while to talk about the lechwe, a species of antelope found in the wetlands of south-central Africa, specifically, the Kapui River in what was Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. In the episode, Marlin and Jim were trying to catch lechwe to move to more suitable habitat.
Man… I wish I would have known all that back in 1992. My partner, Game Warden Henry Balderamas, and I, fresh out of the 42nd Texas Game Warden Academy, got a call from the Willacy County Sheriff ’s Office about a “weird lookin’ deer” in a sugar cane field just off FM 186 near Lasara, Tx., so we headed that way.
When we got to the location, I parked my patrol car on the side of the road, and Henry and I got out for a closer look.
We started by walking down a sendero that was cut through the 10-foothigh sugar cane where water would pool up in a low spot. We didn’t get very far when the suspect weird lookin’ deer jumped up from the edge of the sugar cane about 20 yards in front of us, before looking at us, menacingly, and bouncing off.
It scared us. This thing was unlike anything we had ever seen. It looked like an antelope on steroids. We each took a step back before asking each other, in unison, “What the heck is THAT?” It was a question we would ponder for quite some time, because we had no camera, smartphone, Google or anything to help us figure out what the heck it was.
When I got home that evening, I thumbed through my copy of “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animal Life” but came up empty.
Then, Henry went down for coffee one morning at the local Whataburger and was invited to sit down with a group of local ranchers to perchance provide insight on solving the world’s problems.
One of the ranchers had a local problem that he wanted to ask Henry about. “Have you heard of anyone seeing any lechwe anywhere around?” he asked. “What the heck is a lechwe?” Henry responded.
After a lengthy explanation by the rancher, Henry deduced that the “weird lookin’ deer” we had seen in Lasara, was, indeed, one of the rancher’s lechwe.
Turns out that the rancher had turned out five of them he’d bought at an exotic wildlife auction on his multi-thousand-acre ranch that he hadn’t seen since.
“Well, Jon and I saw one of them in Lasara a couple of weeks ago,” Henry said, nonplussed. Lasara is about 20 miles away from where they’d been released. The rancher just shook his head and walked off.
Here are the rules, straight from the TPW website, for hunting exotics in Texas: It is unlawful to:
• hunt an exotic without a valid hunting license;
• hunt an exotic on a public road or right-of-way;
• hunt an exotic without the landowner’s permission; or possess an exotic or the carcass of an exotic without the owner’s consent. Happy hunting!
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