HUNTING BY MOTOR.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 9 April 1927, Page 14

HUNTING BY MOTOR.

AFTER BIG GAME CURIOSITY OF ANIMALS. Dazzled by the headlights of motorcars passing by night through Epping Forest, in England, numbers of deer are said to have been run down and killed by motorists. And only a little while ago in broad daylight three young deer, crossing a forest road, were killed by a fast travelling car. As a result motorists are said to have become a menace to the fine herd of deer in Epping Forest. But, as most motorists and all big game hunters know,, that charge is not quite fair, for the motor-car exercises a queer |faseinatioH over animals. The most successful method of hunting many of the rarer antelopes in Africa is to motor through their bush haunts. Even the lordly but timid Greater Kudu, a fine horned antelope which lurks in the densest forest, and to hunt which entails gruelling spoofing, including crawling on one’s hands and knees through dense thorn for hours on end, will come right out of his forest lair and stand On the roadside to watch a car go by. Motoring across the Atlii and Kapiti Plains, which jteeiß with huge herds of antelopes and zebra, is one cf Kenya’s fashionable sports. The gieat herds will circle round the ear; inquisitive bull gnus, curious kongoni, and speculative gazelles will run alongside the ear, drawing closer and closer as they speed across the yeld. Baboons caught foraging on a bush-track instead of breaking back to cover of bush, will scamper in a hustling mob, raising blinding clouds of dust in front of a fast moving car. Giraffe will stand stock still in the middle of the road.

At night, lions, leopards, and hyena,; will sometimes fall under the headlights’ spell, and will lope ahead in the dazzling beam. There is a case on record of a motor-cyclist who drove a herd of elephants for several miles along by the Rufigi river, the great beasts keeping in the beam of his lamp. Motorists know how dogs, cattle, and sheep are apt to behave as if bereft both of sense and instinct when confronted by a car. Rats, rabbits, and stoats, bolt into the hedgegrow, but when a car comes by they usually make a suicidal bolt across the read impelled to a mad eourse by some irresistible force.