MAPPING

MAPPING

                                                                          

HUBERTA’S JOURNEY ON GOOGLE EARTH

Huberta’s journey was a remarkable one, the mapping of her journey is a tribute to a young female hippopotamus that walked her way into the hearts of thousands of people around the world.  It is a journey that still captivates the hearts of people, young and old.

Other wandering hippos

There were other wandering hippos, the Amathole Museum newsletter Imvubu writes that there were at least ten other cases of wandering hippos. None as famous as Huberta.

Useful facts about hippo behaviour

Hippo’s spend most of the day either submerged or dozing on sand bars or rocks.  Hippo’s are capable of moving extremely fast through water either swimming or walking submerged under the water along clearly defined paths for about six minutes.

Hippo’s are mainly freshwater animals, they can however sustain themselves in saline conditions, provided they have free and regular access to fresh water.

When food is scarce and not available near the resting pool, a hippo may move as far as 30 km per night feeding.  They normally emerge from the water at night grazing along rivers, estuaries and wetlands.  If no food is available near the water they will move inland to food.  They prefer open areas of short grass crop, an adult can eat up to 30 kg of grass in a night.

One can safely conclude that hippo’s are capable of travelling large distances overland moving from one water system to the next.

Mapping Huberta’s route

Those places of confirmed sightings were plotted first. This information was obtained from various letters, paper clippings and archive material from the Amathole Museum. These places were symbolized by a hippo icon on the map.

Plotted or plotting is a word used in topography, an easier description would be mapping. 

Topography is the detailed map of the surface features of land.  It includes mountains, hills, creeks and other bumps and lumps on that particular part of the earth.  That is how we could discover nearly for certain where Huberta walked.

The route mapped was in certain areas educated guesswork.  It may be that in some places the indicated route is close to Huberta’s actual route, in other sections it might be way off or be totally wrong. Her footprints will never be precisely known.

One certain fact is known, she always travelled south

Included is an alternative section between East London and the farm De Hoop, this will show how far the route can vary.

Mapping the Huberta route clearly shows that Huberta’s journey from St Lucia in the north to the farm De Hoop on the Keiskamma river was in fact possible.