Hippos Latest (And Most Fearsome) Invasive In Western US Rivers - High Country News
On a warm Tuesday in March, Larry Sanders shades his eyes with a leathery hand and surveys the irrigation ditch that slices through his 500-acre farm in Colorado’s North Fork Valley. The ditch is running high and muddy with snowmelt; clumps of hay and the occasional red plastic cup spin lazily on its surface. I move to step onto the exposed clay bank, but Sanders plants his palm against my chest. “Don’t move,” he hisses. “I’ve got him.”
He unslings the .308 bolt-action Remington and raises the scope to his eye. I strain to see what he’s aiming at, but I can’t discern anything in the murky water. The gun abruptly explodes beside me, Larry stumbling with the recoil, and the ditch erupts with spray and flesh – I catch a quick glimpse of a hulking, reddish-brown monster the size of a pickup truck, its vast red maw gaping and the twin scimitars of its curved lower tusks, each as long as my arm, flashing in the morning sun. The creature roars like a freight train, an unearthly bellow that resonates in the deep pit of my gut, and then it’s gone, vanished again into the opaque depths of the ditch. A cluster of bubbles breaks the surface and Sanders fires off a blind shot into the water, scans for telltale blood, but none rises.
“Missed the son of a bitch,” grumbles the farmer. “Again.” I step away and lean over in the tall grass, my hands pressed against my wobbly knees. The echoes of the beast’s roar still reverberate in the valley. I glance fearfully at the ditch – already settled and placid, betraying no hint of the improbable creature that lurks within it. Meet the West’s newest, most terrifying invasive species: Hippopotamus amphibious, the hippo.
No one’s quite sure when the hippos began turning up in Western waterways, nor how they arrived on this continent. Some believe the animals to be escapees, perhaps from a Zanesville-like private collection of exotic fauna. Others claim the animals were deliberately introduced as a prospective food source. (Although that plan may sound farfetched, it was nearly implemented by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900’s.) Conspiracy theorists suspect that the 8,000-pound aliens were turned loose by conservationists who feared the loss of African mammals to poachers, and wanted to ensure that hippos would survive somewhere in the wild.
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http://www.hcn.org/articles/the-nations-most-fearsome-invasive-species-wreaks-havoc-on-western-waterways?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email
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