Tourists and safari guides were left stunned after they spotted a rare ‘albino’ buffalo calf among a herd.
The uniquely coloured calf was an unusual sighting that excited tourists, said Lenny Koshal, who was among the lucky tour guides to spot it.
“I found it near the Sand River at the border of the Mara and Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park but on the Kenyan side. It was a bit shy and that is why it was difficult to take good shots,” said Mr Koshal, who works with Taiyai Safaris Company.
The rare sighting excited his clients, he told the Nation.
“It was after we spotted a leopard called Kazuri hunting and when she failed, we decided to go look for a black rhino near a hill called Ron Hill,” he said.
“That’s when we came across a herd of almost 1,000 buffaloes and when we were driving through, we spotted the unique buffalo.”
At first, he said, they could not tell whether it was a cow’s calf or something else. When they moved closer and took shots, they realised it was a buffalo calf.
The calf looked more like a Friesian calf with white patches and spots on its back, which is unusual for buffaloes, which are black.
Mr Koshal said the calf was the first of its kind he had ever seen in his almost 10 years of experience traversing the Mara and Serengeti parks.
But he believes albinism in wildlife is a genetic issue where the skin loses its pigment.
Mr Koshal nicknamed the male albino calf “Olashe”, which means a cow-calf in the Maasai language.
He hopes that the unique calf remains in Kenya so that people touring the park will continue seeing it.
There have been other sightings of uniquely coloured wildlife in the Mara reserve before.
In 2019, a zebra foal with white spots instead of stripes was spotted by tour guide Anthony Tira.
The foal looked like a crossbreed of a zebra and a donkey. But the rare zebra has not been seen since, with the safari guide speculating that it might have crossed to Tanzania’s Serengeti park.
