Things we learned on safari – Part 4: The Rest!
Dec 25th, 2006 by Oana
Here’s the grand finale of this four part series on our safari experience.
- to attract a predator, cry like a baby – it shows weakness, and the leopards, lions and hyenas will come running with some peri-peri sauce
- you can tell male and female zebras apart based on the pattern of stripes around their bum – males look like they’re wearing a g-string and females a bikini (I think maybe the guide was pulling my leg on this one, but…)
- giraffes never lie down completely with their head on the ground since the increase in blood flow to the brain would be deadly; but they do fold their legs under and sit down when they need to
- other herbivores will often hang around giraffes, taking advantage of their enhanced ability to see predators coming
- the waterbok was very eager to get onto Noah’s Ark, because he really had to use the toilet – unfortunately the paint on the toilet seat wasn’t dry yet, so the waterbok got a permanent stain on its bum (ok, joking… but it makes it really easy to tell a waterbok apart from all the other species of antelope we saw)
- impala stew is tasty! For dinner on one of the nights we ate farmed impala … still felt like we were eating Bambi…
- impala make long burping sounds to communicate – it sounds like a frat house!
- the rhino walks fast, but funny – just like in cartoons, a pitter-patter of little legs holding up a tubby body
- the leadwood tree can live for up to 1,000 years, and the dead tree can remain standing for another 1,000 years after that, because it is very hard wood and very resistant to pests; it makes good firewood, and the ash left over makes good toothpaste (not too minty fresh, but eh); the tree trunk is often covered in sand from elephants who use it as a scratching post
- warthogs (Pumba) back up into their holes, all the better to come out with bared fangs if a lion should attack
- buffalo in Kruger suffer from tuberculosis (which was introduced into the buffalo population from farm cattle) – a lion who eats an infected buffalo can also get sick, and the disease can cross the species boundary to humans too. An uninfected buffalo, usually obtained by taking the baby away from its mother before it has a chance to feed on her milk, and then bottle-feeding it, is worth 100,000 ZAR (over 12,000 CAD).
- lions are often found around buffalo herds; the herds can be huge and their moving through an area leaves it looking like it’s been uniformly mowed
- elephants only have 4 teeth – they’re huge! The teeth are replaced about 5 times during their lifetime; once they get to the last set of teeth, the elephants can only eat soft reeds and grass growing in water sources. They usually die there, and their bones are washed downstream. The elephant graveyard myth isn’t quite true, but other elephants do like to play with the bones and carry them around. We were very lucky to see this skull.
- hippos are shy – well, not really, they are just very sun-sensitive so they spend all day in the water with just their ears showing, and they occasionally dive underwater, holding their breath for up to 7 minutes at a time
