Giraffa giraffa
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Pilanesberg National Park, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
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.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 5 squares of 10 km carry records for Southern Giraffe in and around Pilanesberg National Park, and the 4 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
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.
Give drinking giraffes full space; they abandon the attempt when pressured, and in dry country that costs them.