Even though we’d been in the park for a few days, I was having a hard time believing that this was really happening. Popping awake moments before the alarm to a world that was not yet filled with sunlight. Having fallen asleep far too late, listening to a landscape full of sounds that were so foreign to me. The wooden, time-telling owls at the gates keeping a watchful eye over the line of cars eagerly waiting to strike off on safari.
I sat in the back seat with my face nearly pressed against the window. The sleepy morning conversation was revolving around which roads we should drive down and what animals we would see first. This morning, the first creature to move across the landscape was a giraffe.
I watched it as it moved from one tree to another and started to browse the top-most branches. It was too far away in the dim morning light to get good pictures, so we drove on. Once the giraffe was out of sight, I dropped my gaze for the briefest of moments to make a note in my phone. The note titled ‘Giraffe Count’ had its first entry, one.
When we had entered the park a few days earlier, a giraffe had been the first animal I had seen. For my friend Sarah, and her mum Sharon, who had been coming to Kruger National Park in their home country of South Africa for years, giraffes were a common sight.
They pulled the truck over though and allowed me to gawk, exclaim, and snap a million pictures. We drove on before I was really ready to leave, but they assured me that I would be seeing plenty more giraffes and that if we were going to make it to camp by sunset, that we would have to keep moving. Thank goodness they were in charge of keeping us on schedule because I would never have gotten anywhere.
Of course, Sarah and Sharon were right; in the days that followed we saw many giraffes. Some solitary males, some mothers and calves, and sometimes we would see herds of giraffes known as either a tower, a troop, or my favorite collective noun, a journey of giraffes, as they moved together across the savannah.
I never tired of it. There is something so entrancing about these gentle giants. Standing 15-20 feet tall, I would often find myself craning my neck to watch them forage in the tops of trees. Their tongues shooting out, wrapping around small branches and stripping them of their leaves. While they ate, they seemed indifferent to, rather than grateful for, the oxpeckers that flitted across their forms removing irritating bugs.
So why was I counting giraffes today? It’s a fair question.
I’m from New England, and when you go out looking for our large and charismatic animals, there are likely to be days when you venture out and come back without seeing any. Our bear and our moose are there, but are extremely elusive and scattered through our dense forested landscape. It feels foolish now that I had expected an African Safari to be similar in that way. I expected long hours in the car with nothing but the scenery and the occasional elephant.
I could not have been more wrong; everywhere we looked the landscape teemed with life. Being the animal enthusiast and bird nerd that I am, I was keeping track of which species I was encountering and adding bird after bird to my life list. But I still couldn’t shake the awe I felt at the sheer quantity of animals.
So that day, in addition to my animal and bird lists, I had a tally going of all the giraffes. The list started off pretty slow, but Sarah and Sharon were helping me count and keep track of every encounter. The largest troop we saw was ten giraffes all together.
We were even careful to try not to count the same giraffe twice. If our travels took us down the same road for a second time, any giraffe encounter wasn’t added to the tally. We stuck to that even if the giraffe in question wasn’t in the same general location as the ones we had recorded earlier.
We also had an uncomfortable moment of deciding whether or not a giraffe that had fallen prey to lions should be counted. That giraffe didn’t make the list.
Before entering the park, I thought I knew a fair bit about giraffes. For instance, I could tell you that their hearts are the size of a basketball and that their tongues are 20 inches long and prehensile. I could have told you that the protuberances on their heads are not horns or antlers, but are actually ossicones (ossified cartilage rather than living bone,) having once been sternly corrected after I made a glass giraffe.
As I watched these creatures go about their day-to-day lives, my head exploded with questions. How fast could they run? Did they sleep standing up? What sounds do they make?
I asked Sarah and Sharon an endless stream of questions and jotted down things that I wanted to remember and things I wanted to research even more deeply.
I can rattle off a much longer list of fun facts about giraffes now, but I know that there is so much more to learn. This has always been my favorite part of going somewhere new: constantly finding out how much more there is to know.
Back in the car, we weren’t only watching for and looking at giraffes all day. We watched elephants bathing in the dams, zebra grazing in the grass, and a leopard napping under a tree.
But every time we came across giraffes…we marked it down.
The owls had told us that we had to be back to camp just before sunset, at 6pm. As we rolled back in through the gates, I tallied up the sightings of giraffes. In the front seats Sarah and Sharon were remarking that it had been a light day for giraffes and that maybe we should count again tomorrow.
The final count….61 Giraffes!
