The Crocodiles of Africa

Africa is home to four kinds of crocodile. Only one of them has earned the family its fearsome reputation. Knowing which is which, and above all knowing where each one lives, is the most valuable piece of local knowledge a person in crocodile country can carry. It is the difference between reasonable caution in a forest stream and life-or-death vigilance at a Zambezi ford. So: the map.

The Nile crocodile: the danger

Crocodylus niloticus is the great predator of African waters, and its range is enormous: down the length of the eastern side of the continent, through the Great Lakes of the Rift, across much of central and southern Africa, and, importantly, throughout Madagascar. It is the animal of the Nile, the Zambezi, the Okavango, the Limpopo, Lake Victoria and Lake Turkana. All of them. Where you find large, dangerous crocodiles in Africa, you are almost always finding this species. Everything this book teaches about behaviour at the water's edge is aimed, first and last, at coexisting with the Nile crocodile.

The West African, or desert, crocodile

For most of scientific history, the crocodiles of West Africa were assumed to be Nile crocodiles too. They are not. In 2011, genetic study confirmed what a handful of naturalists had long suspected: the crocodiles of West and Central Africa are a separate species: Crocodylus suchus, the West African or desert crocodile. It is generally smaller than its eastern cousin, commonly two to three metres, and markedly more docile in temperament. This is the animal of the sacred pools of Mauritania and of the Saharan relict populations that cling on in isolated waters like Chad's spectacular Guelta d'Archei, survivors from a time when the desert was green. The reverence with which people in these places have long treated their crocodiles, bathing and drawing water beside them, makes far more sense once you know they are living with C. suchus and not with the Nile crocodile at all.