Things we learned on safari – Part 3: The Animals Marketing Forgot
Dec 24th, 2006 by Oana
If you go to South Africa and fail to see all of the Big 5, there is consolation for you: you can find all 5 in your wallet, on the rand banknotes. The Big 5 were indeed impressive, but the safari wasn’t all about them – we saw so many other animals, including this tiny white frog hiding in plain sight:
We also learned that:
- snakes will usually skitter away from provocation. The most dangerous snake is the puff adder, because it is lazy and you won’t see it until you’re on top of it and it bites you in self-defense. We didn’t see one of these, but on one of our morning walks we did see a lazy rock python sunning itself. Hard to see in the photo, but it was at least 2 metres long. The guides said it was a pregnant female.
- the baboon spider is born with a digging claw, which it uses to dig itself a hole – the only one it will use during its lifetime
- community nest spiders live, spin and eat together in huge webs taking up entire trees
- millipedes smell and taste awful to potential predators, but birds do pick them up and rub them against their feathers to get rid of ticks
- ticks are everywhere in the bush, and they can sense potential hosts passing by based on body heat and carbon dioxide output – if you put your finger about an inch away from the tick, you can see it eagerly open its legs in preparation for feeding
- ticks cause giraffes to lose the end of their tail – a cyst forms, and the long hairs fall off, like on the giraffe on the left in this photo:
- chameleons’ eyes rotate independently, so their brains see two different images at the same time – Ian cemented his “eagle-eye spotter” reputation by spotting this one near the guide’s elbow. See if you can spot it in the photo:
