Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson

      University of California Press

      BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Peterson, Dale.

      Giraffe reflections / text by Dale Peterson ; photographs by Karl Ammann.

      pages cm

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-26685-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

      eISBN 9780520956964

      1. Giraffe. 2. Giraffe—Pictorial works. I. Ammann, Karl. II. Title.

      QL737.U56P482013

      599.638—dc23

      2012038611

      Manufactured in China

      22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

      To the memory of Graham Grindlay (1978–2011)

      CONTENTS

      SPIRITS

      CHIMERAS

      UNICORNS

      ZARAFAS

      GIRAFFIDS

      BODIES

      BEHAVIORS

      MOTHERS

      OTHERS

      KINDS

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      References

      Index

      SPIRITS

      IT WAS STILL DARK when Karl and I left camp. On the way to where we thought the giraffes might be, we passed through a feeding group of Thomson’s gazelles. Illuminated starkly by our headlights, they looked like precious tchotchkes: delicate little legs, prancing style, nervously tic-tocking tails.

      Fifteen or twenty minutes later, we surprised three giraffes lying down in the grass and looking dazed, as if they had just woken up after a long and satisfying night’s sleep. They were emerging from the darkness, bathed faintly in the light-speckling dawn, and all we saw at first was what appeared to be three swaying trees with heads on top. They became alert as we drove closer. They were in a small meadow, edged, protected perhaps, on two sides by a bit of dark and thickety bush, and I imagined the spot as a comfortable bedroom for giraffes.

      Karl took some photographs, but instead of waiting patiently for the sun to rise and cast some interesting morning light on the sleeping beauties, he kept driving around, looking for a better angle, taking one or two quick shots with the engine off, then starting the car, moving to a new position. As he worked, he commented on his photography, the animals, the light. “Yeah, it’s the nice type of light which says they’re just getting up,” he said. But the moment was quickly gone. Soon the light had turned slightly harder, and the three lying-down giraffes were laboriously standing up. Then, slowly, they sauntered away. The sun rose and turned into a seething red ball at the horizon, and so the day began.

      This happened in southwestern Kenya, in the Masai Mara: a rare place where the modern catastrophe has not yet fully dawned, where, in the fading darkness, it is momentarily possible to believe you have reached the fragile beginning of time.

      In the Mara, we saw giraffes singly, doubly. We saw them in groups of three or four or a dozen or more. One time we emerged from a hiding place in the thickets and discovered a group of eighteen. They were Masai giraffes, of course, patterned with brown and splotchy spots. One looked as if she had been made entirely of cream and then one day had been struck forcibly by a mad flock of brown-sugared birds.

      One was lying down, the rest standing, all with their ears flickering and their tufted tails desultorily flicking back and forth. They stared. We stared. They stared and chewed their cuds. We stared and took pictures. They stared and then looked at each other. We stared, took pictures, and then Karl started up the car to move closer and get a better position. Several minutes later, I saw a subtle emergence of giraffe consensus. One turned, another turned, a third turned. Soon a half dozen had turned, and then they were all ambling undulously along, stately and elegant. Karl (working on his lenses, muttering to himself): “Try to do a very wide angle once, take them all in.”

      Later, in northern Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, we came upon a group of six reticulated giraffes (whose markings look like brown plates caught in nets of pale hemp) browsing in a nice pocket of trees and bushes. Four of them looked young, one of them very young. They were spread out at first and chewing at the trees and bushes, but eventually they moved out of the pocket and began slowly, patiently ambling in the same uphill direction. They seemed so finely built, so delicate, and they gradually arranged themselves, as they walked, into single file, the four youngsters in the middle, the big adult male at the rear, the adult female at the head.

      Then, for no good reason, they stopped and gathered to think about things, or so it seemed. They stood still. They looked in several directions. We saw, then, two more giraffes at some distance behind and moving uphill in their direction. The stragglers looked like adolescents or, possibly, full adults. But everything happened very slowly, and Karl and I remained in the car and then settled into another experience of time, where we were immersed in the sweet smell of dry grass and cooled by a dry wind blowing through the windows, heated by a slanting late afternoon sun, fitfully distracted by the buzzing of a fly. I thought: blond savanna, brown bushes: fitting colors for a giraffe. Meanwhile, the tall female outside our vehicle stared at us for a very long time, then began eating a small cache of green leaves edging a brown, thorny bush, while the two stragglers behind her slowly, slowly began to catch up. Now there were eight in the group, pausing, looking, pausing, browsing, pausing.

      A big male had a half dozen red-billed oxpeckers lined up on his back, picking away at a feast of ticks. Karl: “That’s quite a lineup. Must be something tasty.”

      We followed them all slowly, the car grinding away in its lowest gear and struggling heroically over a rough surface of bumps and holes, following the giraffes as they slowly continued uphill, pausing opportunistically at each greenish-brown thornbush. They took bites, too, from the occasional high acacia tree, each filled with a hundred weaverbird nests that dangled like Chinese lanterns. I gazed away momentarily, looking out across a spectacular vista of sun-yellowed plains dropping down to a green-lined river. Then I