African buffalo

Name and taxonomy

Anders Sparrman described the species in 1779 from the Sunday River at Algoa Bay in what is now South Africa. The species name caffer probably refers to that part of the Cape. Syncerus is a genus of one species in the cattle tribe, Bovini, of the family Bovidae. Swahili speakers call the animal nyati or mbogo, and Zulu speakers inyathi.

Most authorities accept five subspecies. The Cape buffalo of eastern and southern Africa is the largest and best known. The forest buffalo of the Congo and West African rainforests is the smallest and is red. The Sudan buffalo and the Nile buffalo occupy the drier belt across West and Central Africa, and a disputed mountain buffalo lives in the Virungas. Some recent authors raise four of these forms to full species, but the IUCN still treats them as one.

Evolution and relatives

The African buffalo is closer to the Asian buffaloes of the genus Bubalus than to cattle or bison. It carries 52 chromosomes, while cattle and American bison carry 60, so it cannot breed with either. A Cape buffalo has been crossed with the Indian water buffalo, however, and the cross contributed to the Jafarabadi breed. Unlike the wild yak and the wild water buffalo, it has never been tamed and has no domestic descendant. Its unpredictable temper is probably part of the reason.

The forest and savanna forms grade into each other around the Congo basin. Genetic work suggests the small red forest buffalo is the ancestral type, and the big black savanna form spread from it. A century ago taxonomists had given the buffalo at least 92 scientific names.

Appearance

A Cape buffalo bull stands up to 170 centimetres at the shoulder, while a forest buffalo stands about 1 metre. The head and body run 170 to 340 cm, and the tail adds 70 to 110 cm. Bulls of the Cape subspecies can pass 835 kilograms, and cows reach about 500 kg. Forest buffalo weigh only 250 to 320 kg. The body is long and barrel-shaped on short, thick legs, so the animal stands lower than its bulk suggests. The front hooves are wider than the back ones, because the heavy head and neck load the front end.

Savanna buffalo are black or dark brown, and old bulls go bald and grey around the eyes and face. Cows tend to be redder than bulls, and all calves are born red. Both sexes carry horns that sweep down, out and up. In a bull the horn bases swell and meet in the middle to form the boss, which does not harden until 8 or 9 years. The span between the horn tips can pass a metre, and the record is 164 cm. Cows have thinner horns and no boss, and forest buffalo have short horns under 40 cm that curve back.

Habitat and range

Buffalo live in a chain of separate ranges from south-east Senegal through West and Central Africa to South Africa. They use savanna, swamp, floodplain, mopane and miombo woodland, and mountain forest. On Mount Kenya they climb above 3,000 metres into bamboo, where they dig up and eat soil for its iron. They like dense cover, such as reeds and thickets, next to open grass. Water is the one fixed need: a herd drinks every day and stays within about 20 kilometres of a permanent source.

Rainfall sets the density, and buffalo are rare where less than 500 millimetres falls in a year. A herd walks a traditional home range of under 50 to more than 1,000 square kilometres along familiar paths. Most herds do not migrate, though moves of over 80 km are on record. GBIF holds records from 49 countries, a count that includes zoos.

Diet and feeding

The buffalo is a grazing ruminant, and grass makes up nearly all of its diet. It prefers leafy grasses such as Themeda in the rains, and it can live on tall coarse grass and sedges that smaller antelope refuse. A wide mouth and a broad row of front teeth let it crop grass faster than most African herbivores. An adult needs about 14 kilograms of forage a day. Feeding bouts alternate with long spells of lying down and chewing the cud.

Browse is a small part of the diet, about 10% at most, except in the forest buffalo and in thicket country. In the Eastern Cape thicket, browse can reach 33% of the dry-season diet. Herds return to a grazed patch when the regrowth is tall enough, and they do not linger on trampled ground. Buffalo lick salt wherever they find it, including the sweat of their herd mates.

Behaviour and social life

A herd is built on related cows and their calves, in a near-linear rank order. Bulls of various ages attach themselves to it, and old or sick animals trail at the edges. Herds range from about 20 in mountain forest to more than 1,500 on the Serengeti. Large herds split and rejoin, and a Botswana study saw 7 of 45 collared cows change herds in one wet season. When a herd moves, pathfinders and senior cows lead, calves travel in the middle, and bulls ring the outside.

A resting herd decides its next move by a kind of vote. Cows stand, face the way they favour, and lie down again, and after an hour or so the herd sets off the way most faced. Rank plays no part in the choice. Bulls hold a separate rank order based on age and size, and the top bull is known by the thickness of his horns. Bulls spar by locking horns and twisting, and a real fight is a single head-on charge onto the bosses.

In the dry season many bulls leave for bachelor groups of 5 to 10. Bulls of 4 to 7 years rejoin the cows in the rains to breed, while some of 12 years or more never go back. These old loners, caked in mud, are the dagga boys, and hunters rate them the most dangerous buffalo of all. Herds are active around the clock, with rest in the early morning and late afternoon, and they graze more at night in the dry season.

Communication and senses

Most buffalo signals are silent. A lowered head offers a spar, an alert posture warns the herd, and the direction a cow faces casts her vote. Bulls read a cow's readiness to mate from her urine, with the lip-curling flehmen face. Sources disagree on eyesight: one says buffalo spot a lion more than a kilometre away, another calls their vision poor. Hearing and scent are keen, and a pathfinder stands apart for up to eight minutes, sniffing and listening, before leading the herd on.

The calls are deep versions of cattle sounds. A low call of two to four seconds, repeated, tells the herd to move, and a creaking sound from a leader turns it. On the way to water some animals give a drawn-out maaa call, as often as 20 times in a minute. An angry bull gives explosive grunts that can turn into a growl. A lost calf bleats, and that call brings not only its mother but the whole herd.

Reproduction and life cycle

Cows first breed at about 5 years, and bulls mature at 4 to 6 but do not win matings until 8 or 9. Mating happens all year, with a peak late in the rains, and most births come in the rains about 340 days later. A bull tends a cow that is coming into season and drives other bulls off, but a stronger bull can take his place. By the time she is fully in season, only the top bull of the herd is still with her.

A cow bears a single calf, and twins are very rare. Newborns weigh about 40 to 45 kilograms and hide in cover for their first weeks. Unusually for a bovid, the calf suckles from behind, pushing its head between its mother's hind legs. Weaning comes at 9 to 10 months, and the bond lasts until the next calf, when the mother drives the yearling off with horn jabs. The interval between calves runs from one year to more than two, averaging 18 to 19 months.

Young bulls leave their mothers at 2 years and join the bachelor groups. Older cows sometimes adopt orphaned calves and watch over several at once. A wild buffalo lives about 11 years on average and up to 22. In captivity the average is 16 years and the record 29.5. Disease is the commonest cause of death, followed by lions.

Predators and threats

Lions are the only regular predator of buffalo over a year old, and in some regions buffalo are their main prey. It usually takes several lions to pull down an adult, though single males have managed it. A buffalo can outrun a lion by about 10 km/h, so lions must ambush from close range. Bulls at the edge of a herd or in bachelor groups die four times as often as cows in the herd. Big Nile crocodiles take calves and old animals at the water, and now and then a healthy adult. Hyenas, wild dogs and leopards take calves, and elephants in musth sometimes kill buffalo.

The herd answers a distress call, and it mobs an attacker. Buffalo have killed lions, trampled cubs, and chased lions up trees and held them there for two hours. In the Battle at Kruger video, a herd took a calf back from lions and a crocodile together. Bulls have driven off more than one lion at once, though usually with severe wounds.

The worst blow in history was the rinderpest plague of the 1890s, which killed up to 95% of buffalo and cattle alike. Today the threats are loss of range to farms, competition with cattle, drought, and poaching for meat. Buffalo carry bovine tuberculosis, foot-and-mouth and corridor disease, so fences keep them from cattle.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the African buffalo as Near Threatened, with about 400,000 animals and a falling trend. The last continental census put the three savanna subspecies together at about 513,000. In the late 1990s the estimate was 500,000 to 1,000,000, with 70% in or near protected areas. Free-ranging Cape buffalo in southern Africa fell by about half between 1991 and 1996.

Herds are stable or growing in the parks of Tanzania, Zambia, northern Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Mozambique's herds are less secure, and the species has been reintroduced to Eswatini. Buffalo pay their way: tourists come to see them, and hunters pay more than 10,000 US dollars for a bull. That money funds anti-poaching patrols and payments to villages for damaged crops. Disease-free animals bred from Kruger stock have sold for close to 130,000 US dollars each.

Relationship with humans

People and buffalo have always met over meat and land. The animal was hunted for food long before its horns became a trophy. Private ranches in southern Africa now keep free-ranging herds and charge up to twice as much for safaris and hunts. Attempts to tame the buffalo have failed, and it is managed only as a ranch animal in the wild state.

Outside the parks, buffalo raid crops and pass disease to cattle, so farmers see them as pests. Bushmeat poaching takes many, and infected meat can pass brucellosis to people. The buffalo is also one of the few African animals that hunts the hunter. Wounded bulls circle back and ambush the people tracking them, which earned the species the names Black Death and widowmaker.

Buffalo are often called Africa's deadliest animal, but the same claim is made for hippos and crocodiles. In Mozambique, attacks by buffalo were far rarer than attacks by hippos or crocodiles. In Uganda, large herbivores attacked more people than lions or leopards and killed almost 50% of those they attacked. In August 2025 a Cape buffalo killed an American hunter in Limpopo, charging at a reported 56 km/h.

In culture and myth

The buffalo's place in modern culture comes from the hunt. Colonial hunters coined the Big Five for the animals that were hardest to hunt on foot: buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, leopard and lion. Safari companies probably turned the hunters' list into a tourist checklist. South Africa printed the Big Five on its banknotes in 1992 and again in 2005, and the buffalo took the 100 rand note.

In hunting lore the buffalo is the Black Death, the widowmaker, and the animal that looks at you as if you owe it money. The Zulu word for mud gave the name dagga boy to the old lone bull. In popular culture, the Battle at Kruger made the buffalo an internet hero. Filmed at Transport Dam in September 2004 and posted in May 2007, it passed 90 million views by 2023 and became a National Geographic film.

The buffalo probably features in the oral traditions of many African peoples, but no specific myth turned up in the sources used here. Its names, nyati and inyathi, probably survive in place names and clan names across eastern and southern Africa. Spirit-animal websites make it a symbol of strength and stubbornness, but that is probably a modern reading, not folklore.