Giraffa giraffa
Drawn from open occurrence records inside Etosha National Park, aggregated onto a 10 km grid.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
Roughly 50,000 southern giraffes make it the most numerous giraffe left, and the ones striding across Etosha's plains belong to the Angolan subspecies, pale, cleanly patterned, and superbly at home in thornveld. Everything about a giraffe is an engineering dare: a five-meter animal running 50 kilometers an hour on legs like stilts, a half-meter prehensile tongue in bruise-purple (sunscreen, probably), and a heart the size of a bag of flour generating double human blood pressure to irrigate a brain two meters above it. They hum to each other at night, at frequencies only recently noticed, and a giraffe drinking, legs splayed, head swung down through six meters, is one of the most vulnerable and mesmerizing sights in the bush.
Loose, ever-shifting herds with no fixed leader. Bulls test rank by necking, slow-motion swinging duels that can turn genuinely violent.
Giraffes against a low sun are the easiest great silhouette in Africa. For something rarer, wait at water: the splayed drinking posture lasts seconds and is worth the patience.
Give drinking giraffes full space; they abandon the attempt when pressured, and in dry country that costs them.