On a late afternoon safari in the Kruger National Park, we came across a herd of buffalo bulls lying down in the long grass. One buffalo caught our attention. He was resting with his head tilted backwards, with his nose and mouth up in the air with his eyes closed. Suddenly a bird appears and adamantly starts picking around the buffalo’s right eye. Once done with the eye, the bird surprisingly moves on to the buffalo’s right nostril. The bird has a quick pick at the nostril before moving away. Immediately a juvenile bird joins and very enthusiastically starts picking in the same nostril. It would pause once with his beak wide open and shaking his head. These expressions looked to us as if it was not too happy with the taste of his bizarre snack. The most fascinating part of the sighting was that the buffalo tolerated these birds for a surprisingly long time.
These birds are called oxpeckers. They were on the buffalo for a good reason. They look for ticks and parasites such as blood-sucking flies, fleas and lice that they consume as food. Amazingly they also remove earwax, grease and even mucus from the buffalo’s hard to reach places such as around the ears, eyes and nose. This behaviour might seem disgusting to most humans where in actual fact it all forms part of an incredible mutualistic relationship that exist between these two different species of animal. By helping to clean the buffalo all over, the birds are extremely useful by decreasing time and effort the buffalo needs to spend on grooming himself. At the same time the bird get his food, no matter what the taste