January 8, 2025
I like old things. In my house I’ve got a wooden carving from a Flemish church dating from the 1800s, some pewter tankards from the mid-1600s, and a smoking pipe of New Zealand origin from around the last war. My usual hunting rifle is an early 1970s Heckler and Koch .308, obtained via the deceased estate of a friend of Erich Honecker, the former communist East German party leader.
January 8, 2025
With my gun case and rucksack I set off to Namibia on my own at the end of May 2024. I was looking forward to my second attempt to bag a mature old kudu bull according to the rules of the Erongo Verzeichnis. Like the previous year, my destination is Hagen Denker's hunting ground at the south-western foothills of the Erongo Mountains.
January 9, 2025
My son, Chris, had the 30-06 Ruger Hawkeye rifle steady on the sticks, with Robin giving extra support with his left shoulder, his well-worn floppy hat shading his eyes from the slanting sun rays. It was just after 10h00 and we had been following different groups of springbok since early morning.
January 9, 2025
There is a sense of sovereignty that comes from atop a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. I love the painful cold of the morning, the brittle new frost beneath my boots, the breathless clarity of the sky. Put both of these together, combine space and time, weather and opportunity, and possibly there culminates a moment where a kudu hunt embarks.
January 10, 2025
Many times it doesn’t end this well for clients. Animals are wounded and lost or never seen. The professional hunter receives, and often accepts, the blame despite bearing none of its responsibility. The teamwork needed for success is the result of the PH and client giving one hundred percent. Hailing from around Southern Africa, I asked three of those who make their living taking hunters into the bush what clients can do to ensure they get exactly what they are pursuing on safari.
January 10, 2025
Having grown up in Namibia, surrounded by its rugged landscapes and abundant wildlife, I have always been a nature lover and conservation enthusiast. This love is what guided my life toward the path of storytelling, with a focus on travel, tourism, conservation and, of course, hunting. As the editor of a hunting magazine that celebrates responsible hunting practices, it felt only right that I should experience a proper trophy hunt firsthand.
January 10, 2025
An opportunity arose to hunt a trophy lion in the Torra Conservancy in north- western Namibia. For the past years the lion population had grown in this area and the human-wildlife conflict increased as a result. The Ministry of Environment and Tourism invited professional hunters to the opportunity to hunt these problem animals, rather than taking the risk that entire prides are poisoned by communal farmers who lose their livestock.
December 3, 2025
Experiencing intense moments in nature, embracing physical exertion and deprivation as a challenge in order to come to know hunting in a way that is rarely possible in today’s hunting grounds in Germany. This was the motivation for my hunting companion Holger and me to travel to Namibia.
December 3, 2025
Stories are manifold of the great springbok migrations in the South African Free State and up the Karoo towards the end of the 19th century, a migration (or trek) that involved many thousands of springbok and formed herds of several kilometres wide. Farmers and hunters of those times told of spurring on their horses in order to get out of the way of the masses of these “trek-bokke”. In Lawrence Green’s book Karoo an incident is related of how a Karoo farmer, Gert van der Merwe, moved his sheep and cattle between grazing lands, assisted by his shepherds and a Khoi wagon leader. “The trek-buck are on their way, and we’ll be trampled to death if we stay in the riverbed”, the driver warned when only a cloud of dust was visible in the distance.
December 3, 2025
I walked in circles around the fallen old warrior for several minutes, studying the scars and characteristics that told the 14- year story of a rugged life lived in the furtherest shag of Mozambique’s northern Zambezi Delta. From the prominent snare marks encircling his neck and right hindfoot, to the smallest tick bites, each blemish in the bull’s weathered skin offered a glimpse into what he had endured since the day he was born, long ago when I was just eleven years old. As much as I wanted to know every episode of his feral life, imagination and speculation would be as close as I could get. The now-forgotten details of the battle that had once been so forceful as to snap his left horn in half will forever remain a mystery.
December 3, 2025
Hunting for me goes beyond the obvious, beyond the daily grind and the collecting of trophies. Even beyond the now hackneyed phrase of “collecting memories” ‒ something probably nobody can really define. Once you allow yourself as a hunter to actually and consciously take in moments and breathe in air, you realise that there is so much more to hunting, and being a hunter.