A young water buffalo has relocated himself to Tung Chung valley – the first in the region for three decades.

He was spotted last week by LBA members near Shek Mun Kap. LBA chair Ho Loy said the buffalo, who is four or five years old, was a shy male who had been chased away from the Ham Tin herd.

But there is no wetland suitable for buffalo, and no other buffalo, in the area, so Ho has proposed returning him to the Shui Hau wetland, where one of the big bulls passed away three years ago. “There’s no point in sending him back to Pui O,” she said.

The AFCD cattle team says he will be difficult to capture if he is in forest or near villages, but are happy to catch and relocate him if he gets near a road or is a threat to traffic or his own safety.

Prior to development in the late 1980s, Tung Chung had for centuries been a farming and fishing settlement with a regular population of buffalo that were used as work animals.

We can see Tung Chung’s last buffalo in this RTHK 1988 documentary on Tung Chung’s last farms. It in Cantonese but we can see buffalo helping in the sowing and harvesting at 2:18 and 6:39.