MyWestworld

Battle at Kruger

Posted on 01. Mar, 2008 by Anne Rose in Travel Blog

Before abandoning the subject of African wildlife safaris, I want to make mention of a YouTube video entitled “Battle at Kruger,” which some have described as the best nature video ever shot. This rivetting, eight-minute piece of footage depicts a clash between a herd of Cape Buffalo, a pride of lions and a crocodile at a watering hole in Kruger National Park in South Africa. The video has drama, suspense and a twist ending with a lesson for everyone.

First posted on YouTube in May 2007, it quickly became one of the hottest uploads in web history that didn’t feature a naked celebrity or a politician making a career-ending gaffe. As of January 1, 2008, the video had attracted more than 22 million views and 20, 000 comments and had been covered in Time magazine. This fall, the National Geographic Channel plans to air an hour-long special documenting the story.

The clip was filmed during a guided safari in September 2004 by American tourist David Budzinski, who enjoyed spectacular timing and luck, especially considering that he barely knew how to turn his camera on. As the Texan told ABC News, “It’s a camera that I had used maybe once a year. Even today, I have to practise with it to remember which buttons do what. I truly was blessed at the time to hold it steady and catch what I did, because very easily, I could have missed so much.”

Ironically, Budzinski did not post his video on YouTube. In fact, he didn’t even know what YouTube was. Jason Schlosberg, a fellow vacationer on the safari that fateful day in 2004, asked Budzinski for a copy of the video, because he’d “never seen something so amazing.”For more than two years, the Battle at Kruger remained something Budzinski and Schlosberg occasionally shared with family and friends when they stopped by for a visit. Then, in May 2007, Schlosberg finally decided to share the clip with a friend of his from South Africa who’d moved to Ohio and had been pestering Schlosberg to see the video. To avoid long lines at the post office, Schlosberg put the clip on the Internet and a global phenomenon was born. Let me know what you think.

Tags: Videos