On Tanzanian Safari: The Guides’ Big Five Wildlife Lessons

A sequel to Safari To The Serengeti For a Birthday Trip, Both Hair Raising and Life Transforming

By Sonya Zalubowski*

Here’s some of what I learned about African animals from the guides on my game-viewing safari to Tanzania:

We saw all of the ‘Big Five’ on our safari. I never knew exactly what they were and what the term meant, ‘the five most dangerous animals to hunt on foot in Africa’. They include the Cape buffalo, the elephant, the leopard, the lion and the now rare black rhino, hunted for its horn, prized in Asia as a medicine. That last, the rhino, was so far away the only way we could tell that was what we were seeing was through magnification in our cameras.

Photograph 2015 ©Sonya Zalubowski

The wildebeest, comical-looking animals that they are with their higher front haunches, big heads, and striped sides, don’t as individual animals set any intelligence records. We saw two herds milling about near our tents one early morning, as though they were trying to decide the direction where they might find the water and new grass they sought. Suddenly, the herds took off, one group going the right way toward the river down below our camp while the other herd headed back in a string in the very direction from which they’d just come. Later, a short  distance  away, we found the errant herd milling around again, looking at the lead wildebeest — any one of the herd can step up to the job — and wondering, doubtless, where there might be a zebra to save them.The wildebeests can smell the rains from miles and miles away, the very water that the zebra need even more frequently than wildebeest for their existence. That’s when the two species’ instinctual smarts kick in — and the wildebeest and zebra work together to accomplish their migration.

 The wildebeest have also found a way as a species to thwart all the predators lying in wait for them. They give birth to their calves on the plains in February, always around high noon when most of those predators are seeking shade somewhere else. Even if some are around, the numbers of dropped calves are so huge that no predator could consume them all. The timing also coincides with just the right amount of minerals in the grass necessary for their offspring and those of the zebra, who give birth one to two months earlier.

 The awkward looking but graceful giraffes, their small heads and long necks moving forward like a crane when the animal walks, have a symbiotic relationship with their main food source, the tall flat-topped acacia trees dotted all over the savannahs of northeastern Tanzania. The tree manages to have small leaves, even in dry times, protecting them from most scavengers with their long prickly thorns. However, the giraffes’ agile tongue manages to work between those obstacles to take the leaves. But, when the tree has had enough of the browsing, it unleashes its secret weapon: a chemical that is distasteful to the animal, driving it to another part of the tree, and eventually away all together. In that way, both manage to survive, the tree and the giraffe.

Hippos – officials consider adding them to the Big Five as number six — must keep their skin moist at all times or it will crack and they may die of infection. The massive animals do that by staying in a river or watering hole all day long when the sun is out, choosing to go out on land during the cool nights to eat the grass that keeps them alive. They also excrete a red gel that covers the parts of their backs still exposed in a river. They huddle together in the water, ocasionally yawning and exposing their giant teeth. At night, you can hear them on the land, grunting and wheezing and honking as they browse.

We saw one big male lion, the likely patriarch of his pride, with a female flirting around him at his vantage point near a river. It was springtime in Africa after all. A short time later, when the big male was on his own, reclining with his big dark ruff of a mane at the same spot, another female and her male friend crossed in front of him. The female seemed very determined as she and her suitor took off. Pretty soon, we saw them in hot pursuit of that other female. Our guides said she must have been from outside the pride and the female now in pursuit wanted her out of there. The entourage made a big circle crossing right in front of our game jeep. We watched them disappear into the nearby woods, only to see them once again rushing in front of the dominant male on the other side of the river. The threesome circled once again in front of us and disappeared into the woods. The next day, we saw that same female back with the dominant male, doing what animals do in springtime.