From Rod Murphy, Pinegowrie, South Africa
You report “weird orange crocodiles” found gorging on bats in caves in Gabon (15 October, p 16). In the 1980s I worked with Partridge Films on a documentary for the BBC called Stolen River, about the drying-up of the Savuti river in Chobe National Park, Botswana, due to a tectonic shift. The crocodiles and hippos died out totally and the rest of the game migrated to the Linyanti river system.
Out looking for shooting locations, I climbed a nearby hill late one afternoon. I sat down to watch the sunset and looked around. I could not believe what I saw: a crocodile sunning itself on a ledge outside a small cave.
At dusk, bats started flying out. The crocodile snapped them out of the air. The following evening and dawn we set up and filmed it. A few weeks later, after we got the film rushes back from the lab, we decided to shoot some more. We set up a camera with a motion sensor one afternoon and retrieved it the next day. Imagine our surprise when we got the film back to see a leopard ambush and kill the crocodile.
