49 Fun Facts About Safari

The word 'safari' entered English in the 1800s from which East African language?

Swahili 'safari' simply means a journey, any journey at all, and traces back to Arabic 'safar'; explorer Richard Burton carried the word into English around 1860.

Which five animals make up the safari 'Big Five'?

Lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, buffalo became such a national emblem that South Africa put one on each of its rand banknotes in the 1990s; the rhino slot covers both the black and white species.

Africa's Big Five earned that name as the five animals that were what?

Hardest to hunt on foot: big-game hunters coined the term for their five most dangerous quarry, and the safari tourist trade later adopted it wholesale.

The Serengeti's name is believed to derive from a Maasai word usually interpreted as meaning what?

Endless plains is the gloss guidebooks give for a Maasai word, siringet, yet the word is said to be missing from Maa dictionaries, so the famous translation may be more legend than linguistics.

Which South African reserve, first protected in 1898, became the country's first national park in 1926?

Kruger began as the Sabi Game Reserve, set up in 1898 because hunters were emptying the Lowveld of big game, and took President Paul Kruger's name when it became a national park.

Which small bird rides on buffalo, rhinos and giraffes, picking ticks from their hides?

Oxpecker pairs look like the perfect cleaning service, but they also peck at their hosts' wounds to drink blood, so researchers now think the relationship is partly parasitic.

The Okavango Delta in Botswana is unusual among deltas because its river does what?

Never reaches the sea: the Okavango spills into a tectonic trough in the Kalahari, fans out across the sand and simply evaporates or soaks away, leaving a vast green oasis in a desert.

The Okavango's annual flood originates from summer rains in the highlands of which country?

Angola's highlands catch the summer rains, but the water takes months to creep south, so the delta floods at the height of Botswana's dry winter, just when wildlife needs it most.

Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania holds what geological distinction?

World's largest intact, unfilled caldera: a giant volcano erupted and collapsed on itself two to three million years ago, leaving walls 600 metres high around a floor of about 260 square kilometres.

Which famous Leakey family hominin site lies within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area?

Olduvai Gorge is where Mary Leakey spotted a skull about 1.8 million years old in 1959; its massive jaw and grinding teeth earned it the nickname Nutcracker Man.

What does the name Etosha, Namibia's famous national park, mean in Oshindonga?

Great White Place is the usual translation of Etosha, named for the vast mineral pan, dry and dazzling for most of the year, that covers nearly a quarter of the park.

Etosha was first proclaimed a game reserve in 1907 under which colonial administration?

German South-West Africa's governor proclaimed the reserve, and it then ran all the way to the Skeleton Coast; later boundary changes cut it to a fraction of that size.

Which Kenyan reserve do the Great Migration's wildebeest reach each year from Tanzania?

Masai Mara is the northern end of the circuit: around July the wildebeest pour in from the Serengeti in search of fresh grass, then turn back south around October.

The fastest land animal's claws differ from other cats' claws in what way?

They never fully retract: the blunt, exposed claws dig into the ground like the cleats on a sprinter's shoes, giving the cat grip as it accelerates and swerves after prey.

The dark 'tear streaks' running from the eyes to the mouth are unique to which safari cat?

Cheetah tear streaks run from the inner corner of each eye to the mouth and are thought to cut the sun's glare, a help to a cat that hunts by day.

What are the closest living relatives of the hippopotamus?

Whales and dolphins are the hippo's closest living kin: DNA studies show the two lines split about 55 million years ago, which puts a hippo nearer to a humpback than to the pigs it resembles.

The red secretion on a hippo's skin, nicknamed 'blood sweat', actually functions as what?

A natural sunscreen: the secretion, neither blood nor sweat, contains the red and orange pigments hipposudoric and norhipposudoric acid, which absorb ultraviolet light and also inhibit bacteria.

A feral population of hippos in South America descends from animals kept by which man?

Pablo Escobar kept four hippos at his Hacienda Nápoles estate; after his death in 1993 they were left behind, escaped, and multiplied along Colombia's Magdalena river basin.

How do a giraffe's neck bones compare with a human's?

Same count, far longer: a giraffe has seven neck vertebrae just as we do, but each can be over 25 cm long. Pumping blood up that neck takes a heart weighing about 11 kg.

Why is a giraffe's long tongue thought to be so dark, almost black?

To protect it against sunburn is the usual explanation: the dark pigment on the exposed front of the tongue is thought to shield it during hours of browsing in full sun.

The African bush elephant carries its calf for about how long before giving birth?

22 months, nearly two years, is the longest pregnancy of any mammal; the calf arrives weighing around 100 kg, and its mother will give birth only once every few years.

An African elephant's trunk ends in what?

Two fingers: the finger-like tips of an African elephant's trunk work together to pluck small food. The Asian elephant manages with a single finger at the end of its trunk.

Which hypothesis for zebra stripes is most strongly supported by the evidence?

They deter biting flies is the best-supported idea: Tim Caro's 2014 comparative study tied striping to tsetse and horsefly ranges, and later experiments showed flies failing to land on striped coats.

The last captive quagga died in which city's zoo in 1883?

Amsterdam's Artis zoo held the last quagga, a mare that died in August 1883. Nobody realised she was the last of her kind, perhaps because people then used 'quagga' for any zebra.

The name 'wildebeest' comes from which language, meaning 'wild beast'?

Dutch gave the name, but 'beest' meant cattle in South African Dutch, so the 'wild beast' was really wild cattle. Its other name, gnu, is thought to come from a Khoisan word.

Spotted hyena society is unusual among mammals for what reason?

Females dominate the males: they are larger and more aggressive, and even a low-ranking female generally outranks a high-ranking male.

Despite their dog-like build, hyenas are more closely related to which animals?

Cats and civets: hyenas sit on the cat-like branch of the carnivores, and their dog-like build is convergent evolution, the result of running prey down on open ground and catching it with the jaws.

A group of lions, the most social of wild cats, is called what?

A pride is the lion's group: typically several related lionesses, their cubs and a coalition of one to a few adult males; the females do most of the hunting together.

Outside Africa, wild lions survive only in and around which Indian national park?

Gir Forest in Gujarat holds the last wild Asiatic lions; they survived because the local Nawab kept the forest as his private hunting ground, and from that remnant they have recovered to several hundred.

The two man-eating lions of Tsavo, which attacked railway workers in 1898, lacked what?

Manes were missing on both Tsavo males, as on many lions there; railway engineer John Henry Patterson shot them, used the skins as floor rugs for some 25 years, then sold them to Chicago's Field Museum.

The African wild dog's scientific name Lycaon pictus refers to its coat and means roughly what?

Painted wolf: Latin pictus means painted, after the blotchy black, tan and white coat. No two dogs are marked alike, so researchers can tell every member of a pack apart on sight.

At a kill, which members of an African wild dog pack are allowed to eat first?

The pups eat first while the adults stand back. Hunters returning to the den also bring up meat for the young, their mother and any sick or injured dog that could not join the chase.

Which swollen-trunked African tree, nicknamed the upside-down tree, can live for some 2,000 years?

Baobab: radiocarbon dating put Zimbabwe's Panke baobab at about 2,450 years when it died in 2011. Since 2005 most of the oldest known baobabs have died or partly collapsed, and nobody is sure why.

The meerkat of the Kalahari is a small member of which family?

Mongoose: the meerkat, Suricata suricatta, is a small social member of the family Herpestidae; groups post a sentry while the rest dig for beetles, scorpions and larvae.

Which former US president's 1909 safari collected specimens for the Smithsonian?

Theodore Roosevelt set out three weeks after leaving office, taking his 19-year-old son Kermit. The haul ran to thousands of animals, and the museum's naturalists needed eight years to catalogue it.

Which long-legged African bird of prey hunts snakes on foot, killing them with kicks?

Secretarybird: it walks the grassland and stamps on a snake's head until it stops moving. One trained male hit a force plate with five times its own body weight, each kick landing in about 15 milliseconds.

Which American author turned his own East African safari into 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'?

Ernest Hemingway hunted in East Africa in 1933-34. The trip fed this 1936 short story, set on a big-game safari, and the non-fiction Green Hills of Africa.

Which mountain across the Tanzanian border forms the backdrop to Kenya's Amboseli National Park?

Kilimanjaro rises just over the border in Tanzania, behind Amboseli's swamps. The elephants in the foreground are among the best studied anywhere: researchers have followed the same families since 1972.

Newborn wildebeest calves can do what within minutes of birth?

Stand and move with the herd: a calf is on its feet about six minutes after birth. Most cows calve within the same few weeks, so predators are swamped and far more calves get through.

The 'king' variety of the fastest land animal differs from the ordinary form in what way?

A blotched, striped coat: the spots merge into blotches and dark stripes along the spine. It was once named as a separate species, but the cause is one recessive gene, the same one behind blotched tabby cats.

The hippopotamus belongs to which order of mammals, alongside pigs, deer and cattle?

Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates) includes the hippo, which bears its weight on four toes per foot, while the rhino, with three toes, sits among the odd-toed Perissodactyla.

A black panther in Africa is a melanistic form of which safari animal?

Leopard: in Africa and Asia a black panther is a melanistic leopard, the dark coat coming from a recessive allele with the rosettes faintly visible beneath; in the Americas the term means a jaguar.

Where does the rosette-coated big cat typically stash a large kill to keep it from scavengers?

Up a tree: the cat hauls carcasses heavier than itself into the branches, out of reach of lions and hyenas, a feat made possible by its powerful neck and shoulders.

What term describes the fused horn bases that shield the forehead of a male Cape buffalo?

The boss is the solid shield where a bull's horn bases fuse across the forehead. It takes years to fill in and cows never grow one, so the horns help tell a buffalo's age and sex.

How do the cows in a resting African buffalo herd appear to pick its direction?

By facing the way they favour: cows stand, gaze one way and lie down again, and the herd later leaves along the majority bearing. Biologist Herbert Prins likened it to a vote, with no single leader deciding.

Which is the smallest and hairiest of the five living rhino species?

Sumatran is the smallest rhino, at around 700 to 800 kg, and wears a shaggy reddish-brown coat. The hair is a family trait: it is thought to be a close relative of the extinct woolly rhinoceros of the ice age.

A rhino's horn is made of which material, the same stuff as human hair and fingernails?

Keratin: the horn has no proven medicinal value, yet poachers still kill for it. Because it grows back like a fingernail, some reserves sedate their rhinos and saw the horns off every couple of years.

Which Danish author's 1937 memoir Out of Africa recalls her Kenyan coffee farm and safaris?

Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, ran the farm until drought and falling coffee prices sent her home to Denmark in 1931. The 1985 film, with Meryl Streep as Blixen, won seven Oscars including Best Picture.

Which 1966 film told the true story of Elsa, an orphaned lioness raised in Kenya and released?

Born Free followed Joy and George Adamson as they raised Elsa and then taught her to live wild. Its stars, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, went on to found the Born Free wildlife charity in 1984.