Safari just means a journey
SAFARI is the Swahili word for a journey, borrowed from Arabic, and in East Africa it still means any trip at all. The grassland most safaris cross is the SAVANNA: wide plains of grass dotted with trees, with a long dry season and a wet one, and more big grazing animals than anywhere else on Earth.
The best-known event is the great migration. Every year around one and a half million WILDEBEEST, with hundreds of thousands of ZEBRA and GAZELLE, move in a huge loop between Tanzania's Serengeti and Kenya's Maasai Mara, following the rain and the fresh grass, and crossing rivers where the CROCODILE waits.
Elephants talk below our hearing
An ELEPHANT herd is led by the oldest female, the matriarch, whose memory of water holes and dangers can save the family in a drought. Elephants communicate partly with rumbles so low that people cannot hear them, and the sound travels through the ground as well as the air; elephants several kilometres away can pick it up through their feet and trunks.
Each TUSK is an overgrown tooth. The trunk is a nose and upper lip joined together, with tens of thousands of muscles, strong enough to pull down a branch and delicate enough to pick up a single peanut. Elephants also grieve, returning to touch the bones of a dead family member.
Seven neck bones and flies that hate stripes
A GIRAFFE has seven bones in its neck — exactly the same number as a mouse or a person. Each one is simply enormous. Its heart has to be powerful to push blood up that far, and its dark tongue, about half a metre long, wraps round thorny acacia branches to strip the leaves.
Nobody was sure why ZEBRA are striped until experiments in 2019 put striped coats on horses and filmed biting flies trying to land. The flies approached but failed to touch down properly on the stripes, which seem to confuse their final approach. Keeping off flies that carry disease may be the main reason for the pattern, though it may not be the only one.
Dangerous grazers and misunderstood hunters
The HIPPO spends the day in water and comes out at night to graze, and it is one of the most dangerous large animals in Africa, fiercely defending its patch of river. Its skin gives off a reddish oily liquid that works as a sunscreen and may help fight infection, which gave rise to the myth that hippos sweat blood. A RHINO horn is made of keratin, the same material as hair and fingernails.
The HYENA is not a kind of dog; it is more closely related to cats and mongooses. Spotted hyenas live in groups ruled by females, and they hunt most of their own food rather than only scavenging. MEERKAT groups post a sentry that stands upright watching for eagles while the others dig. The rest of the grid holds the LION and LIONESS of the PRIDE, the CHEETAH and LEOPARD, the BUFFALO, IMPALA, ANTELOPE, JACKAL, WARTHOG, BABOON, OSTRICH, a grazing HERD and a lion's MANE. Our big cats page has more on the hunters, and national parks covers where they are protected.