Sterling’s Blog

Giraffes are one of my favorite animals.  In my opinion, they are one of the most beautiful and interesting animals in Africa.  We have seen them in Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Tanzania.

Giraffes are HUGE!  A baby is as tall as a grown man!  6 feet tall!  They live on average 28 years.  Even though Giraffe necks are so long, they only have seven vertebra (the same as humans) but each Giraffe vertebra is much longer than a human vertebra.  The reason Giraffes have such long necks is so the can reach higher branches and avoid competition for food with almost every other animal other than elephants.  Giraffe legs are so long that the only way that they can drink is to sprawl out their legs. 

A Giraffe’s enemies are Spotted Hyaena, Cheetah, Lion, and Leopard.  When a Giraffe sees a predator he or she will grunt or snort.  Then the Giraffe will run away at up to 55 km. per hour.   If the predator is too close and there is not time for the giraffe to run it will give a kick which could kill a lion.  Since giraffes have very good vision and hearing, they do not often get put in that situation.

Unlike most animals, Giraffes are born with horns but the horns are squishy and soft and made of cartilege.  They are called floating horns.  Later Giraffe horns become hard bone attached to their skull.  Giraffes rub necks when sparring and when a pair is together.  Two fighting male Giraffes could break each other’s necks, bones, horns or even kill each other, but those events are very unlikely.

We went to a Reptile Park in South Africa.  We got to feed terrapins (turtles), black mambas (snakes), and Giant Plated Lizards.  The terrapins and Giant Plated Lizard ate hibiscus flowers and the mambas ate mice.  When the Giant Plated Lizards climbed on to our hands to eat the flower we could lift them up until they were done with their snack.  When they were done they would jump on to the rock.

They had some chameleons and Bearded Dragons that had been mistreated by their previous owners who had dumped them at the park.  A Bearded Dragon had been put underneath a bad heating system and had been badly burnt.  He had to have his tail and 2 legs cut off.  A chameleon had been fed wrong and was weak and small instead of being strong and bright and colorful.  The park was trying to help them but unfortunately the damage was permanent. 

Almost every day the park gets called by people to take away snakes and even lizards from their property.  Some of the cultural beliefs think chameleons and geckos are bad.  Once they collect the reptile from the house they do scientific research on it and see if it is sick or not.  If it is sick, they will take care of it until it’s better.

At the end of our tour our guide let us hold a big Burmese Python.  Most people think snakes are slimy but it is the exact opposite.  The Python felt smooth and soft.  The reason people think snakes are slimy is because the reflection off their scales make them look like they are wet and slimy, but it’s just reflected light.

It was very exciting at the Reptile Park and I wish I could go there again.

Once there was a Desert Plated Lizard named Sandy.  He lived on the Roaring Dune at Skeleton Coast, Namibia, Africa.  On the dune next door lived his friend Sandra.  Sandy and Sandra loved to slide down the sand dune and watch as the sand rippled down the dune.  One day they decided to go see what was beyond the Roaring Dune. 

When one of the tourist buses came, Sandy and Sandra started to wave and the bus stopped.  Three people ran out and caught Sandra but Sandy was too quick.  While Sandra was being a movie star, Sandy ran up and jumped on the bus.  He then screamed to Sandra in lizardish (which humans cannot hear), “Come to the truck when you get put down.”  So after a half hour of getting photos taken (which she quite enjoyed), Sandra dug a tunnel in the dune and popped right up in front of the bus and jumped on. 

About 30 minutes later the bus arrived at the beach.  The two lizards had never seen so much water.  They walked around the rocks and all of a sudden they saw a fish.  They thought it moved just the way they did in the sand.  They walked around for about 29 minutes watching the people catch four HUGE 2 feet long fish!  It was good that they went in the bus then because one minute later the bus drove away with the lizards. 

The next stop was a sandy beach.  The lizards thought it was a wonderful place and even thought about moving there.  A few minutes after they got off the bus they met a big ferocious crab.  He grabbed and pinched them and chased them down the beach.  When the crab finally left, they looked down the beach and discovered that the bus was lost in the mist! 

They started walking away from the ocean planing to walk to the nearest dune.  Suddenly Sandy shouted, “There’s the bus!”  They scampered over to the object that Sandy called a bus only to find it was the grave of a stranded lizard by the name of John S. Lizard.  “We are really helpless now,”cried Sandra.  “I know,” exclaimed Sandy, “Let’s dig a lizard hole.”  They dug and dug and dug until they came across 17 lizard skeletons!  They both screamed and ran out of the hole. 

Then Sandy remember something that the grave had said, “Died on Skeleton Coast January 5, 1872.”   ”Ahhh!  We are on Skeleton Coast!!!” Sandy screamed.  Sandy and Sandra had heard a lot about how so many lizards had gotten stranded on Skeleton Coast, and how horrible the place was.  The two lizards ran as fast as they could until Sandy yelled happily, “Look!  There is the bus!!!  Yay!!!”  They both jumped on the bus with glee a second before it roared away to the Roaring Dune!

The End

The word “Hippopotamus” means “water horse” in Greek.  Hippos are in the family of Hippopotamidae.  The earliest hippo fossils found were from 16 million years ago.  Surprisingly, a hippo’s closest relatives are whales and porpoises, instead of pigs or rhinos.

The plural for hippopotamus is hippopotami and for hippo it is hippos.  A group of hippos can be called a pod, herd, dale, or bloat of hippos.  A bull is a male, a cow is a female, and a calf is a baby hippo.

Hippos are one of the largest land mammals in the world.  The elephant is the largest and heaviest land mammal, but it is debated whether hippos or White rhinos are second largest.  The average hippo is 11 feet long and 5 feet tall at its shoulders.   The average weight for an adult male hippo is 3,300 to 4,000 pounds, for a female it is 2,900-3,300 pound, and an old male can weight over 7,000 pounds!!! 

Hippopotami eat 88 pounds of food every night.  That is 1.5% of their body weight.  Hippo’s graze at night and wallow in the mud all day.  They like short of patches grass called “hippo lawns.”  In zoos, the hippos are fed herbivore pellets, alfalfa, Bermuda hay, lettuce and as a special treat melons.  We went to the Cairo Zoo and got to feed a giant hippo alfalfa.  From personal experience, hippos have HUGE mouths!

Hippos live in rivers and lakes in the sub-Sahara desert in Africa in groups of up to forty.  Hippos have clear eyelids like goggles to see under water.  Since they cannot float or swim, hippos walk underwater!  Only the male hippos are territorial, and the male hippos are only territorial in the water.

There are 125,000-150,000 hippos left in the wild.  Zambia and Tanzania have the biggest hippo populations.   Unfortunately, hippo populations are declining mostly because of poachers.  The poachers want the Hippos soft 20 inch teeth that are perfect for carving and their meat, which people eat. 

Hieroglyphics were the Ancient Egyptians’ form of writing.  The word  ”Hieroglyphics” means “sacred engraved letters.”  There are three types of Egyptian writing.  First there was hieroglyphics which was difficult to write.  Then as writing became more common they developed two more types of writing, demonics (common) and hieratic (priestly).

There were 800 hieroglyphics in the Old, Middle and New Kingdom but by the Greco-Roman period there were over 5,000!!  That sounds very confusing! When one hieroglyphic is combined with another it makes a totally different hieroglyphic.  What also makes it more confusing is that you can read hieroglyphics from left to right, right to left, and up to down!  The way to tell whether to read it right to left or left to right is to determine which way the hieroglyphic bird is facing.  if the bird is facing left, start left, if facing right, start right.  Confused ?!?!

In the 5th century the Hieroglyphica of Hora (a stone with two languages, hieroglyphics and another language that the Egyptologists  knew) was discovered.  That explained 200 hieroglyphics.  Then Napoleon’s army discovered the  Rosetta Stone (similar to Hieroglyphica of Hora) in 1799 but nobody deciphered it until Champollion in the 1820’s.  Both of those stones were not enough to complete the Egyptian alphabet though so they used cartouches (in photo on left, along the bottom).  Cartouches are ovals with king, queens, and sometimes gods names in them.