A LARGE AND IMPRESSIVE LATE 20TH CENTURY CAPE BUFFALO SKULL....

Estimate

£400 - £600

A LARGE AND IMPRESSIVE LATE 20TH CENTURY CAPE BUFFALO SKULL.
Reputed to be a record size. Very large adult with full upper skull and teeth (one tooth missing). With handwritten letter from Léna Godsall Bottriell detailing how the skull was obtained in 1979 straight from the bush. Léna and her husband Paul, a 308 rifle each, the Buffalo and one very focused pride of lion. 110cm wide. From tip to tip running along underside and over the skull 190cm.

“This is one set of top condition African Buffalo Horns with only one previous owner before Paul and me - the Bull Buffalo! Collected straight from the bush in 1979 – and held by us ever since – there’s a riveting back-story to the acquisition: Paul and I on foot, a .308 each, a thorn thicket, the Buff…. and one very focused lion pride.
Paul’s a superlative shot, priding himself on placing one bullet just right – ‘like that prolific Karamojo Bell….?’ I once breathlessly opined....his return glance not caring for the comparison. It’s a principle he passed to me, not a bad shot myself (inherited from my Australian pioneer ancestor stock). For Paul the hunt, usually for the pot, was a one-to-one encounter on equal terms, using lighter weapons, ‘not bazookas’ he’d say.
Having decamped from our Land Rover, we’d only gone a short way before picking up on some low grunts and muffled bellows of a Buffalo and out of curiosity headed toward it; rounding a thorn thicket the scent of lion hit full-on – and with this a lioness suddenly broke cover…...then as suddenly again a Buffalo hove full into view moving purposefully toward the lioness, galvanizing her attention back to him. We sensibly grabbed the chance and somehow got ourselves out of there; our Land Rover – thankfully not the open-top canopy-off of tourist game drives – never looked so welcoming. As the inevitable followed, chastening sounds echoed back as we drove off.....two sober folk very thankful for the Bull’s distracting intervention. Returning a few days later, the full panoply of the work of first lion, then the bush clean-up squad was there vividly on show – all that remained of one big mature Bull Buffalo mid a scattering of bones, broken branches, twigs, churned up earth was its crowning glory of horns. Fate put him in our path; may his soul rest in peace”.
Léna Godsall Bottriell, September 2021

Paul Bottriell and Léna Godsall Bottriell have been the chief field researchers of southern Africa’s legendary striped and blotched King Cheetah, an enduring interest fired by a chance remark during Paul’s Rhodesian boyhood about a cat “neither lion, leopard, nor cheetah”; an allure that later captivated a 20 something Léna when Paul first spoke of it to her one day in the majestic New Guinea Highlands. Just a few years on followed the ground-breaking 2 year field expedition that captured the attention of the world's media - confirming King Cheetah is not ‘myth’ and, moreover, not extinct but still extant in the wild, involved the first balloon search of its kind for a specific animal, doubled recorded specimens, located a genuine KC skull, obtained film, involved a hair analysis first with a astounding results, the definitive book of it published by Brill of Leiden. A research record spanning decades that doesn’t keep to cheetah but extends to leopard and two published books of same, Giant Sable antelope, Four Tusk Elephant….as well outliers of nature, neglected and un-neglected, and all with many defining bush adventures along the way - not least the heart-stopping encounter that bequeathed them this stunning set of African Buffalo horns, its impressive boss understood to be record.

This May 2021 a ‘star’ high in the firmament of wildlife adventure dimmed with the needless passing of Paul, not result of the bush perils – lion, elephant, buffalo, crocs, venomous snakes, tsetse fly, malaria, terrorists, landmines - he’d faced off all through his life. The far-from-mundane didn’t take him – First World pre-COVID medical negligence did, hard to compute in the 21st. Century. Léna is determined to carry on their legacy and years work together that packed in so much, not least an historic on-going DNA analysis investigating the evolutionary development in relation to geography of cheetah overall; including wild King Cheetah samples in number for the first time; sub-fossil and Giant European Cheetah fossil material never before examined. Hence to support and enable this legacy to continue, Léna’s offer of sale of these impressive ‘with a story’ Horns to a new custodian, hopefully as appreciative of this Buffalo as Paul and Léna have long been – but for very different reasons: arguably their lives.