GIRAFFE – BROWSING GIANTS
Very content and peaceful grazing with other antelope like Plains Zebra, Impala and Springbuck, the Giraffe giraffa camelopardalis, stands head and shoulders above them all. It
is the world’s tallest living animal. A newborn calf is nearly 6 feet tall when born.
Giraffe can be described as social animals, but cannot really be described as a herd
animal. Groups form loosely and disband just as easy. A cow and calf can be the core of the group, thus attracting
other cows and calves. Some groups consist of young males or females. These groups change almost on a daily basis.
The main reasoning behind this is that as the giraffes mix and mingle with different groups, predation seems to be
much less of a problem. Giraffes in these loose groups can keep visual contact over great distances, thus knowing
when predators are spotted by any other group. Old bulls do become solitary and rarely join other groups.
Contact us today to arrange your Namibia safari where you will have the chance to spot these animals in the
wild.
Giraffes are browsers, mainly eating leaves from Acacia trees. Leaves are chewed quickly and swallowed, and later
regurgitated to be chewed again. Being a ruminant, it means that a giraffe can take nearly all the nutrition from
the leaves it is eating. The Giraffe has tough lips and a very strong tongue. The tongue is wrapped around a branch
and then the leaves are stripped. Even if a branch has thorns, it does not seem to bother giraffes.
Giraffes mainly inhabit savannah country with enough trees to provide food. Etosha National Park is one
such place where quite a lot of giraffe can be found. Like all mammals giraffes have predators. Lion and Spotted Hyena being the most formidable. For
protection the giraffe can kick and uses it head to knock over or kill predators that venture too close. The two
horns on top of a giraffes skull is just short stubby bones, but once the giraffe swings that long neck, there is a
lot of force behind the swing.
Like fingerprints of humans, the pattern of each giraffe differs. Some are darker, and it does seem the older an
animal becomes the darker it becomes. Every patch differs from all other giraffe. It is truly a stately beast, and
a pleasure to watch, sometimes comical, as when drinking, but always drawing the eye.
A last very interesting fact of the giraffe is that it has about three times the blood pressure of a human being.
Having such a tall neck the heart is heavily muscled and strong enough, so that it can pump blood to the brain.
When a giraffe bends down to drink, there are a number of valves in the neck that prevent blood rushing to the
brain and causing problems.
Tall and majestic, the giraffe is as much part of the African savannah as the lion.
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