- Book information
- Giraffe Reflections by Dale Peterson and Karl Ammann
- Published by: University of California Press
- Price: £27.95/$39.95
Giraffe Reflections is a stunning compendium of animal photography and entertaining history, but it's light on giraffe biology and conservation
BOOKS about giraffes are few and far between – and often aimed at children. Giraffe Reflections carves a different path around this intriguing animal.
See more of Karl Ammann's photographs in our gallery: "The secret life of giraffes caught on camera"
The first few chapters relate the history of several civilisations' first encounters with giraffes. Peterson tells us of Egyptian king Ptolemy II's grand parade in the 3rd century BC. It featured more than 70,000 soldiers, 96 elephants, 19 cheetahs, 16 ostriches, 14 oryxes, 14 leopards, and a single, elegant giraffe – apparently the star of the show.
That giraffe was the first of its kind to be seen in Egypt for nearly 1000 years, and Ptolemy's people didn't know what to make of it. They called it a camelopard, after its camel-like gawkiness and its leopard-like spots, and the rumour arose that it was an actual hybrid of those two unlikely parents. (The ancient confusion lives on in the species' scientific name, Giraffa camelopardalis.)
A millennium later, Chinese explorers brought several giraffes to the imperial court, where someone decided the strange animals must be unicorns. They may have reached that conclusion because of the skin-covered horn that many giraffes have in the middle of their foreheads, or perhaps because unicorns, according to myth, were creatures that foretold good fortune.
Half a world away and a few centuries on in Renaissance Italy, Lorenzo de' Medici tried the same trick, importing a giraffe to Florence at great cost to boost his prestige. It worked – his son later became pope.
All this is fascinating stuff, and Peterson spins some engaging yarns, but these chapters are really about people and history, with giraffes playing only an incidental role as the featured curiosity.
Peterson gets to the science eventually, with chapters on evolution, body form, behaviour, reproduction, and interactions with other species. But even here, the coverage is idiosyncratic. The chapter on body form, for example, devotes about half its pages to stories of the first Europeans to collect giraffe specimens for scientific study. Only then do we get to the question of why giraffes have such long necks – not just to eat leaves that other species cannot reach, but also to see predators lurking in the grass, to cool their bodies in the midday sun, and to use as weapons when males fight for dominance. In another chapter, Peterson presents giraffe behaviour almost exclusively through the eyes of zoologist Anne Innis Dagg, the first researcher to study the animals in the wild, in the 1950s.
Dagg has her own book on giraffes in the pipeline for next year, which may sit better with hardcore biology geeks than Peterson's subjective, impressionistic approach. For some, the information density in Giraffe Reflections will be frustratingly low, especially in the final chapters, which describe how giraffe numbers have plummeted in recent decades. Where once African herders saw giraffes every day, their children now see none. Only about 75,000 giraffes survive in the continent today, Peterson says, and their numbers are divided among six largely separate subspecies.
That's an alarming situation, but concerned readers will find little additional detail. Why the decline? Peterson makes passing reference to hunting as a cause, but says nothing about other factors such as fences, farming or habitat loss. He says even less about what conservationists are doing about the decline, although he is distinctly pessimistic about the future of the species.
But these are mere quibbles, as the real point of the book is Ammann's gorgeous photos of giraffes, both atmospheric shots and more prosaic ones of the animals going about their business. With Peterson's entertaining text as a filigree, the combination is an emotionally satisfying presentation that still manages to convey a fair bit of knowledge about giraffes.
This article appeared in print under the headline "The gentle giraffe"
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