SOMETHING NOT apparent in The Lion King was Pumba the warthog’s most remarkable magic trick: the ability to disappear. Surprise a warthog in the African wild and it’ll take off like a Formula One driver. Often you can trace its course through the grass by its aerial-like tail, which is at full mast when sprinting. Then, suddenly, it’ll vanish as if it had never been there.
Being a favourite dish of so many predators, warthogs are constantly on alert, and they seldom venture far from their burrows, into which they’ll escape when threatened. Typically deep and narrow, these underground lairs are where they seek shelter, and rear their young. But warthogs, and many other animals, are in fact rent-free lodgers. They have no part in the design and construction of their homes. That is left to another remarkable creature, the aardvark (which means ‘earth pig’ in Afrikaans).
I was at Khoisan Karoo Conservancy in South Africa’s Northern Cape to see the Shy Five, a pentad of extraordinary creatures on the opposite end of the spectrum to the safari industry’s Big Five (leopard, lion, elephant, buffalo and rhino). Safari operators deliver truckloads of tourists to within mobile-phone-photo distance of all five within a week. But ask for an aardvark, bat-eared fox, porcupine,
