GEEO Kruger Safari Google Earth Presentation

USA

Today I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to South Africa through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

This particular trip was a safari. The word “safari” comes from Swahili, a language spoken across East Africa, and it simply means “journey.” Today it usually means a trip to observe wild animals not in a zoo, but in the places where they actually live, out in the open.

Africa

South Africa sits at the very southern tip of the continent of Africa. Africa is the second-largest continent on Earth—only Asia is bigger—and it is much larger than most maps make it look. You could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe inside its borders at the same time and still have room left over.

Why do so many people picture Africa as smaller than it really is? It comes down to maps. The most common world map, called the Mercator projection, was designed centuries ago to help sailors navigate. To do that, it stretches the areas near the top and bottom of the map (like Greenland, Canada, and Europe) and shrinks the areas near the middle (like Africa). The result is a map that’s useful for sailing but very misleading about size.

Africa is home to 54 countries—more than any other continent—and to more than 2,000 languages. It is also the continent with the greatest variety of large land mammals left anywhere on Earth. Elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, and hippos once had relatives on nearly every continent. Most of those relatives are gone. Africa is where the great herds and the great predators survived.

South Africa

South Africa sits where two oceans—the Atlantic and the Indian—meet. It is a big country, roughly twice the size of Texas, and it packs in an astonishing variety of landscapes: snow-capped mountains, deserts, thousands of miles of coastline, and the hot, low-lying grasslands full of wildlife.

South Africa is sometimes called the “Rainbow Nation,” a nickname made famous by Archbishop Desmond Tutu that celebrates the country’s mix of cultures, languages, and peoples. South Africa has 12 official languages—more than almost any country in the world—including Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English, and, in the region we visited, Xitsonga (pronunciation). South African Sign Language became the twelfth official language in 2023. [Can you imagine your school announcements being read in twelve languages?]

South Africa is also unusual because it has three capital cities. Pretoria is where the president works, Cape Town is where laws are made, and Bloemfontein is home to the highest court. This arrangement was made as a compromise when the country was unified in 1910.

To understand South Africa today, you need to know about a difficult chapter in its history called apartheid (pronunciation). Apartheid was a system of laws, in place from 1948 until the early 1990s, that separated people by the color of their skin and treated them unequally. The word comes from Afrikaans and means “apartness.” Under apartheid, a small white minority held power while the large Black majority was denied the vote, forced into separate areas, and blocked from many jobs and schools. South Africa held its first fully democratic election in 1994 and elected Nelson Mandela president. That history matters on a visit to South Africa, even a safari; many of the country’s national parks were created during the era of apartheid, and not everyone was treated fairly when they were.

Johannesburg

While it is not one of South Africa’s capital cities, Johannesburg is the economic engine of the country. Around six million people live in the city proper and many more in the surrounding metropolitan area. (A metropolitan area is a major city plus its suburbs and nearby cities and towns. [Can you use your city or a nearby city as an example?])

Johannesburg exists because of a rock. In 1886, a prospector found gold on a farm here, and within a decade a dusty stretch of grassland had become a boomtown. Locals call the city eGoli, a Zulu word meaning “place of gold.” If you fly into Johannesburg today you can still see enormous flat-topped yellow hills on the outskirts. They aren’t natural hills at all; they are mine dumps, piles of crushed rock left over after the gold was extracted, and some of them are more than a century old.

That gold rush shaped everything about the city, including the darker parts of its history. Mining companies needed huge numbers of low-paid workers, and the system that developed to control and separate those workers helped lay the groundwork for apartheid. Johannesburg became the beating heart of both South Africa’s economy and, later, its struggle for freedom.

The airport in Johannesburg is named for Oliver Tambo, a leader of the anti-apartheid movement who spent thirty years in exile organizing opposition to the government from abroad.

Great Escarpment

A long wall of cliffs and mountains runs like a horseshoe around the interior of southern Africa. Johannesburg sits on one side of the Great Escarpment in an area called the Highveld, a high, open grassland plateau; “veld” is an Afrikaans word for open grassland. Winters there (which take place during the summertime for us in the Northern Hemisphere) are cold and frosty.

On the other side of the Great Escarpment, the cliffs drop steeply to the Lowveld, which is hot, humid, and thick with thorn trees and tall grass. In about an hour of driving, you can pass from a climate like Colorado into a climate like southern Florida. That single steep drop is the reason this region is so full of animals. Warmth, water, and year-round grass provide food for huge herds of animals.

For most of the 1800s, Europeans avoided the Lowveld because of malaria, a serious disease spread by mosquitoes, and nagana, a livestock disease spread by tsetse flies. Farming was difficult and cattle died. That is part of why so much of the Lowveld was still mostly wild in 1898 when it was set aside as a game reserve. While people had lived in the Lowveld for centuries, the land had not been converted to farms like other places in South Africa.

Greater Kruger

The largest and most famous national park in the Lowveld is Kruger National Park. The park is government land, but along its western edge sit dozens of private reserves and community conservancies—areas where landowners have agreed to manage their property for wildlife instead of farming or building. Beginning in the 1990s, many of these landowners took down the fences between their properties and the national park. Overnight, the animals’ world got much bigger.

This broader area is called the Greater Kruger, and it is one of the most important conservation stories in Africa. Animals like elephants, wild dogs, and lions need enormous ranges. A fenced park, no matter how big, is an island—and small islands lose species. By joining land together, the Greater Kruger now covers well over 8,000 square miles.

Kruger is also the South African anchor of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, a “peace park” that links protected land across three countries: South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

One of the towns in the Greater Kruger area is Phalaborwa (pronunciation) on the park’s western boundary. Phalaborwa has been a mining town for a very long time—people were smelting copper here more than a thousand years ago! The ancient, indigenous smelting furnaces are preserved nearby inside the national park.

Kruger National Park

Kruger National Park is one of the largest and most famous game reserves on Earth. It covers about 7,500 square miles—nearly the size of New Jersey, and larger than many small countries. It stretches roughly 220 miles from north to south and averages about 40 miles wide, with some 1,800 miles of roads inside it. [Can you name a park, forest, or wilderness area near your school and compare its size?]

The South African government counts roughly 147 species of mammals, more than 500 species of birds, 114 reptile species, 49 fish, 34 amphibians, and 336 kinds of trees within Kruger National Park. No other African reserve has more species of large mammals. Recent estimates put the park’s populations at something like 17,000 elephants, 48,000 buffalo, 1,500 lions, and 1,000 leopards.

Kruger began in 1898, when President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic proclaimed the Sabi Game Reserve to stop the near-total destruction of Lowveld wildlife by commercial hunting. The reserve was expanded and renamed Kruger National Park in 1926.

Creating and expanding the park meant removing communities who lived on the land. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people were moved out of the Sabi reserve in 1903, and similar removals continued for decades. In 1969, about 1,500 members of the Makuleke community were forcibly relocated so that their land could be added to the park. In 1998, after South Africa became a democracy, the Makuleke won their land claim and the territory was returned to them. Rather than move back and farm it, however, they chose to keep it wild and now earn income from lodges operating on their land.

The Baobab

This tree is one of the park’s famous baobabs (pronunciation). A baobab’s trunk can get as wide as a school bus is long! They have small, scraggly branches on top that spread out like a root system. That’s why its nickname is the “upside-down tree”—several African stories explain the shape by saying a god pulled the tree up and jammed it back into the ground the wrong way around.

Baobabs are extraordinary trees. Their spongy trunks store water—a large tree can hold thousands of gallons—which lets them survive long dry seasons. Some living baobabs have been carbon-dated at well over 1,000 years old, and researchers estimate that the oldest may approach 2,000–3,000 years. Their fruit pulp has more vitamin C than orange juice and more calcium than milk. Elephants strip and eat the bark; the tree simply grows it back.

Because they are so long-lived and so obvious on the landscape, individual baobabs often become landmarks—people give directions by them and meet under them.

Bush Walk & the Big Five

Most of a safari happens from a vehicle, but they can also include bush walks—on foot, with guides. From a truck, you scan the horizon for big animals. But on foot, you look down and learn to read tracks in the dust, identify droppings, notice which thorn trees you should not brush against, and hear how many different birds are calling at once.

From a vehicle, Kruger is one of the best places on Earth to see what are known as the “Big Five:” lions, leopards, elephants, rhinoceroses, and Cape buffalo. These are not the largest animals—a giraffe and a hippo are both bigger than a leopard. And they are not the rarest, either. The term was actually invented by big-game hunters in the late 1800s, and it named the five animals considered most dangerous to hunt on foot. A buffalo circling back on the person tracking it was, and is, one of the most feared situations in the bush.

While big game hunting is strictly prohibited and illegal in Kruger today, the phrase lives on, because the animals still draw millions of visitors who arrive with their cameras instead of rifles. The money those visitors spend on safari now helps pay for the rangers who protect the animals.

Seeing all five is never guaranteed during one safari. Leopards in particular are shy and mostly nocturnal, and rhinos are increasingly hard to find. The best odds come in the dry season (roughly May through September), when the grass is short, the leaves have dropped, and animals cluster around the few remaining water sources.

African Elephant

This view is not within Kruger, but it gives you a good idea of what can happen while you are on safari: African elephants crossing the road! These elephants are the largest land animals alive. A big male can stand over eleven feet at the shoulder and weigh as much as four pickup trucks. Kruger holds around 17,000 of them. The herds are normally very quiet, because their feet have thick cushioning pads.

But let’s start with the trunk, because it is one of the strangest structures in the animal kingdom. An elephant’s trunk contains no bones at all and an estimated 40,000 muscles. (For comparison, your entire body has around 600.) It works as a nose, an arm, a hand, a hose, a snorkel, and a trumpet. An elephant can use it to uproot a tree or to pick up a single blade of grass.

Elephant families are led by a matriarch—the oldest female. A herd is essentially a group of related females and their calves; adult males usually leave around their teens and live alone or in loose bachelor groups. The matriarch remembers where to find water, which route avoids danger, and which other elephants are friends. Research shows older matriarchs lead herds that survive hard years (for example, during droughts) better than herds led by younger females.

Elephants also talk to each other in sounds humans mostly cannot hear. Alongside their trumpets and squeaks, they produce very low-frequency rumbles called infrasound—below the range of human hearing—that travel for miles through the air and the ground. Elephants may detect some of these vibrations through their feet and trunks. This allows a herd on one side of a valley to communicate and coordinate with a herd on the other side.

Their memory and social lives are genuinely remarkable. Elephants recognize each other by sight and smell, appear to mourn dead herd members by touching their bodies and bones, and have been recorded reuniting joyfully with elephants they had not seen in decades.

Elephants are also ecosystem engineers—animals that physically reshape their habitat. They push over trees, which keeps the savanna open instead of turning into thick woodland. They dig in dry riverbeds with tusks and feet, creating water holes that dozens of other species then drink from. Their dung spreads seeds across huge distances and fertilizes them at the same time. A single elephant can produce well over 200 pounds of dung a day, and that dung feeds beetles, birds, and eventually the soil itself.

The main threat to African elephants is poaching—illegal hunting—driven by demand for ivory, which comes from their tusks. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the African savanna elephant as endangered.

Lion

There are around 1,500 lions in Kruger, and when visitors see them, they’re usually surprised by how lazy they look. Lions rest up to twenty hours a day. Watching a pride sprawled on their backs in the shade with their paws in the air, it is hard to believe you are looking at Africa’s most powerful predator.

Lions are the only cats on Earth that live in permanent social groups. A pride is built around a core of related females—mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts—plus their cubs and usually one to three adult males. The females stay with the pride for life. The males are temporary: a group of males will join a pride for a few years before being driven out by younger, stronger challengers.

The females do most of the hunting, and they hunt as a team. A zebra or wildebeest can outrun a lion, so the lionesses instead spread out and drive their prey toward hidden lions. Most hunts fail, and the lions catch their prey only about a quarter of the time, so they also chase away hyenas, cheetahs, or wild dogs who have brought down an animal to steal the meal whenever they can.

The males’ jobs are mostly defending the pride’s territory. A lion’s roar can be heard up to five miles away and is meant to tell other lions that the territory is claimed and help scattered pride members find each other in the dark. The male lion’s mane is a signal too; researchers have found that darker, fuller manes are associated with older, better-fed, higher-testosterone males, and that lionesses and rival males both pay attention to it.

Lions are listed as vulnerable. Their numbers across Africa are estimated to have fallen by roughly half over the past 25 years, mostly due to habitat loss and conflict with people who lose livestock to them.

Leopard

Of the Big Five, the leopard is the one most likely to see you without you ever seeing it. Kruger has around 1,000 leopards spread over 7,500 square miles, and they are solitary, secretive, and mostly active at night.

Leopards are the most widespread big cat in the world, found from South Africa to Siberia, and that vast geographic range comes from being extraordinarily adaptable. Leopards eat almost anything—antelope, monkeys, birds, fish, insects—and they can live near cities, in deserts, and in rainforests.

Their signature behavior is caching: dragging their food up into a tree. A leopard can haul a carcass heavier than itself vertically up a trunk, using shoulder muscles and a low center of gravity. They do this to protect their meal from lions and hyenas, both of which will happily steal their meal.

Those spots are not spots, technically. They are rosettes—rings of dark fur with a brownish-orange center, shaped like a flower. Cheetahs, by contrast, have solid round spots. Jaguars, found in the Americas, have rosettes with additional spots inside them. Rosettes provide camouflage, helping them blend into leafy trees, tall grass, and the shifting shadows of the savanna.

Rhinoceros

Two species of rhino live in Kruger. This is a white rhino, the larger of the two. It is the second-heaviest land animal after the elephant. It has a broad, flat, square upper lip, which works like a lawnmower for cropping short grass. White rhinos are grazers, relatively calm, and comparatively social; you will often see several together.

The black rhino is smaller, rarer, and has a pointed, hooked upper lip that works like a finger for grabbing twigs and leaves off shrubs. Black rhinos are browsers, solitary, and famously bad-tempered.

Neither is actually white or black—both are gray. The origin of the names is genuinely unknown. Safari guides often explain that “white” is an English mistranslation of a Dutch word for “wide,” describing the animal’s mouth, but researchers who searched Dutch and Afrikaans writings could find no evidence that anyone ever called the animal “wide.” Just because a story is widely repeated does not make it true!

A rhino’s horn is not bone or ivory. It is made of keratin—the same protein as your fingernails and hair—packed into dense fibers. It grows back if it is trimmed, which matters enormously for conservation. Rhino horns are worth more per pound than gold on illegal markets, and poaching has devastated South Africa’s population. In 2025, there were roughly 175 rhinos killed illegally in Kruger, close to double the total in 2024. The park has responded by expanding ranger patrols, adding K9 units, deploying camera and sensor networks, and polygraph-testing staff after investigators linked some poaching to corruption inside the park.

The single most effective tool is dehorning. Veterinarians sedate a rhino and saw off most of the horn—painlessly, like a very large fingernail clipping—so poachers have nothing to take. A study published in Science in 2025, drawing on data from 11 reserves in the Greater Kruger region between 2017 and 2023, found dehorning reduced poaching by about 78% while consuming only around 1.2% of the total rhino-protection budget.

Cape Buffalo

The Cape buffalo is the Big Five member visitors to southern Africa are most likely to underestimate. It looks like a cow, but it is not a cow. Buffalo have never been domesticated anywhere, and professional hunters historically considered them the most dangerous animal in Africa to pursue on foot. A bull can weigh close to a ton, and the fused bony shield across the top of his skull, called a boss, is essentially built-in armor.

Kruger has an enormous population of buffalo, somewhere around 48,000, and they move in herds that can number in the hundreds. From a distance, a big herd looks like a dark stain spreading across the grass. Buffalo herds appear to make group decisions in a genuinely democratic way. Researchers observing herds noticed that while resting, individual adult females would stand, stare in a particular direction for several seconds, and lie back down. When the herd finally moved, it traveled in roughly the average of all the directions the females had indicated—not the direction chosen by the biggest or most dominant animal. In other words: they take a vote, and the majority wins.

Buffalo also have the best reason of any animal in the park to fear lions. They are a lion pride’s biggest and most valuable target, and the two species have a long, brutal relationship. Buffalo do not simply run away from lions. A threatened herd will form a defensive wall with calves in the middle, and buffalo have been recorded returning as a group to attack lions that have taken one of their own.

Old solitary bulls, past breeding age and pushed to the edges of the herd, are known in South Africa as dagga boys—from a Zulu-derived word for mud, because they spend their days wallowing in the mud. They are also the individuals most likely to charge, and guides treat them with enormous respect.

Giraffe

The giraffe is the tallest animal on Earth—males can reach about 18 feet tall, which is roughly the height of a two-story house. Nothing prepares you for seeing one in person. They move slowly, and they are completely silent.

Giraffes only have seven bones in their neck—exactly the same number you have! Almost all mammals do, from mice to whales. A giraffe’s vertebrae are simply enormous, up to about ten inches each.

Being tall creates problems, and the giraffe solves them in remarkable ways. Its heart can weigh around 25 pounds and generates roughly twice the blood pressure of a human’s, because it has to push blood up a six-foot neck to the brain. When a giraffe lowers its head to drink, a system of valves and a network of elastic blood vessels at the base of the skull keeps that pressure surge from knocking it out. Tight skin on the legs acts like compression socks, a design that has genuinely been of interest to NASA engineers.

The tongue is about 18 to 20 inches long, and it can grip like a finger. The dark purple-black color of the tongue is thought to protect it from sunburn during the many hours a day it spends extended reaching for leaves from acacia trees.

Nearly every textbook says the giraffe’s neck evolved to reach high leaves, and that’s the leading explanation, but it’s not certain. Some biologists believe that the long necks were driven instead by “necking”—the contests in which males swing their heads like sledgehammers at each other to establish dominance. Most scientists now think the feeding advantage of a long neck is the primary driver, with necking as an added benefit.

Zebra & Wildebeest

Kruger’s plains zebra are impossible to miss and incredible to see up close. The stripes are sharper than a photograph can capture. Every zebra’s stripe pattern is unique, like a fingerprint, and young zebras learn to recognize their mother by her pattern, her voice, and her smell within hours of birth.

Why do zebras have stripes? People have argued about this for decades. Camouflage? Confusing predators? Cooling the animal down? Over the last decade, the evidence has swung hard toward a much less glamorous answer: biting flies. Researchers mapped where striped horse relatives live and found the pattern lines up closely with the range of horseflies and tsetse flies, which carry deadly diseases. Then they ran an experiment, dressing ordinary horses in striped, black, and white coats while filming the flies. Flies circled zebras and striped coats just as often, but far fewer managed to land. They approached too fast and bounced off, apparently unable to judge the striped surface as a landing pad. Not everyone is convinced by this explanation, and some researchers still argue that temperature regulation is the main driver. The fly hypothesis currently has the strongest experimental support, but it is an active debate.

Zebras are usually seen alongside blue wildebeest, also called gnu—large, gray, rather odd-looking antelopes with a beard and curved horns. The two species graze together constantly. Zebras have excellent eyesight, while wildebeest have a sharp sense of smell and hearing. Zebras also crop the tall coarse tops of grass, while wildebeest prefer the shorter growth underneath. Grazing together means they can be on the alert for predators together without competing for food.

The famous million-animal wildebeest migration happens in the Serengeti and Masai Mara further north in Tanzania and Kenya, not in Kruger. Kruger’s wildebeest and zebra move seasonally within the park, but the enormous river-crossing spectacle you may have seen in documentaries is happening 2,000 miles to the north.

The Antelope of Kruger

Kruger has more than twenty species of antelope. Antelope are not deer, which grow and shed antlers made of bone every year. Instead, they grow permanent horns with a bony core and a keratin sheath.

Impala are everywhere in Kruger—by far the most numerous large animal in the park, numbering well over a hundred thousand. Guides joke that they are “the McDonald’s of the bush,” partly because everything eats them and partly because the black stripes on their rump and tail form a rough letter M. Impala can leap about 30 feet horizontally and 10 feet straight up, often bounding in different directions at once to scatter a predator’s attention.

Greater kudu have enormous spiral horns, up to five feet along the curve. Despite their size, kudu vanish into thick bush almost instantly. They are browsers, eating leaves rather than grass, which lets them share the same land as grazers without competing.

Nyala (pronunciation) show one of the most dramatic differences between males and females of any antelope: males are shaggy, charcoal-gray, and horned, while females are small, sleek, and bright chestnut with white stripes. Early naturalists sometimes thought they were two different species.

Waterbuck have a distinctive white ring on the rump that looks exactly as though the animal sat on a freshly painted toilet seat—a comparison guides in southern Africa like to make. They also produce an oily, strong-smelling secretion in their coat that waterproofs them and may make them less appetizing to predators.

Steenbok are the smallest antelope you are likely to see in Kruger. They are about the size of a cat, and they freeze when they see a predator rather than run.

Eland are the largest antelope in the world, with males weighing close to one ton!

Hippopotamus

Kruger’s rivers hold large numbers of hippos, and by day they look like the least exciting animals in Africa. You might see dozens of them in the water, occasionally letting out a big yawn. They are not actually yawning, though; it is a threat display, meant to show off their canine teeth, which can grow well over a foot long.

The hippopotamus is often called the most dangerous large land animal in Africa for humans—not because it hunts people, but because it is enormous, territorial, surprisingly fast on land, and will attack anything that gets between it and the water.

Hippos cannot really swim, and they are too dense to float. What they do is walk and bounce along the riverbed, pushing off the bottom in long, slow-motion leaps. They surface to breathe every three to five minutes—automatically, even while asleep!

Their skin secretes a thick reddish fluid that early observers described as “blood sweat.” It is neither blood nor sweat, but is instead a remarkable substance that acts as a sunscreen by absorbing ultraviolet light, and as an antibiotic by discouraging infection in the many wounds they give each other.

Hippos spend the day in the water and come out at night to graze, walking inland from the river and eating up to about 80 pounds of grass. That nightly commute makes them important nutrient movers: they eat on land and poop in the water, transferring nutrients into the river system and feeding the fish and insects at the base of the aquatic food web.

Do you think hippos and pigs are closely related? Their closest relatives are actually whales and dolphins! DNA and fossil evidence show hippos and water mammals like whales share an ancestor that lived roughly 55 million years ago. The hippo is more closely related to a humpback whale than to a pig, despite how much they resemble each other.

Rivers & the Nile Crocodile

Rivers are a very important part of the Kruger ecosystem. There are six major rivers that run west to east across the park, and in the dry season when it doesn’t rain, they are the reason everything can stay alive.

The rivers also hold the park’s largest reptile: the Nile crocodile, which can exceed 16 feet and weigh over 1,500 pounds. Crocodiles are ambush predators that will lie motionless for hours with only their eyes and nostrils above the waterline. They cannot chew and instead grip prey, spin their whole body to tear off pieces, and swallow chunks whole.

Crocodile mothers are very attentive to their nests, which they guard for around three months. When the hatchlings are ready, they call from inside the eggs, and the mother digs them out, gently carries them to the water in her mouth, and protects them in the river for weeks. For an animal with a reputation as a mindless killer, that is a lot of parenting!

Crocodiles also have temperature-dependent sex determination: whether an egg develops into a male or a female depends on how warm the nest is, not on chromosomes. That makes them unusually vulnerable to climate change—shifting temperatures can skew whole generations toward one sex.

All of the rivers in Kruger begin outside the park, in farming and mining country to the west, which means they carry whatever happens upstream into the park. Water extraction for agriculture, pollution from mines, and silt from eroded farmland have all affected Kruger’s river health. Starting in 2008, hundreds of crocodiles in the Olifants River Gorge died of a disease called pansteatitis. Despite years of testing by multiple research teams, no single pollutant has ever been identified as the cause, but the investigation made clear that the Olifants River system as a whole is in poor health. Scientists are still working on this one, and it is a real unsolved case.

Spotted Hyena

No animal in Kruger is more misunderstood than the spotted hyena, and most of the misunderstanding comes from cartoons. You might get the idea from movies like The Lion King that hyenas are cowardly scavengers who steal from noble lions. Almost every part of that is backwards.

Spotted hyenas are skilled hunters that kill the majority of what they eat, often working in coordinated groups to run down wildebeest, zebra, or antelope. And when it comes to theft, field studies have repeatedly found that lions steal more kills from hyenas than the other way around. The Lion King also portrayed hyenas as a sidekick to lions, but the two species are enemies, competing for the same prey and killing each other’s young when they get the chance.

Hyena society is also one of the most complex among carnivores. A clan can include eighty or more animals, and it is a matriarchy—a society led by females, just like elephants. Every adult female outranks every adult male, and rank is inherited: a cub automatically takes its mother’s position in the hierarchy, so the daughter of a high-ranking female outranks other adult animals. Males leave their birth clan as young adults and must join a new one at the very bottom.

Researchers who have followed wild hyena clans for decades think this social structure comes down to competition for food. Hyenas feed in frantic scrums where dozens of animals converge on one kill, and a mother who cannot push her way in cannot feed her cubs. Interestingly, recent studies suggest the deciding factor is not raw strength but social support—in a dispute, the hyena with more allies nearby usually wins, regardless of size.

The famous hyena “laugh” is actually a distress or excitement call, usually made by a lower-ranking animal under pressure at a kill. Hyenas have a whole vocabulary of whoops, groans, and giggles, and researchers can identify individuals by their voice.

Two more things worth knowing about hyenas: First, they are not dogs. Despite looking vaguely canine, they belong to their own family and are more closely related to cats than dogs. And second, their jaws generate one of the most powerful bites of any mammal, which means hyenas consume parts of a carcass nothing else can, and clean the savanna in the process.

Cheetah & Wild Dog

The cheetah is the fastest land animal on Earth, capable of about 70 miles per hour in short bursts and of accelerating faster than most sports cars. Everything about its body is built for that: a flexible spine that acts like a spring, semi-retractable claws that work like track spikes, an oversized heart and nasal passages, and a long tail used as a rudder for cornering at speed.

But speed comes at a cost. A cheetah can only sprint for roughly 20 to 30 seconds before overheating, and after a chase it must rest, panting, for up to half an hour before it can even begin to eat. That is when lions and hyenas arrive—and cheetahs, which are relatively light and lack the strength to defend a kill, simply walk away. This is one reason Kruger holds only a few hundred cheetahs, and they are exceptionally rare to spot on safaris.

Another rare predator in Kruger is the African wild dog, also called the painted dog or painted wolf. It is Africa’s second-most-endangered large carnivore, with fewer than 7,000 across the whole continent. Kruger holds one of the most important remaining populations. Where the cheetah is a sprinter, the wild dog is a marathon runner. A pack picks a target and simply follows it until the animal is exhausted. With this strategy, their hunts are successful something like 70–80% of the time, compared to roughly 25% for lions.

Wild dogs care for injured and elderly members by regurgitating food for them. Pups eat first at a kill, before the adults. In addition to these discoveries, researchers studying packs of wild dogs noticed that before a hunt, the dogs gather, greet each other, and sneeze. Analysis showed the sneezes function like votes: the more dogs that sneeze, the more likely the pack sets off on a hunt. If a dominant dog sneezes first, only about three sneezes are needed to begin the hunt; if a low-ranking dog starts it, ten or more may be required. It is an incredible, measurable voting system, with weighted votes!

The Big Six Birds

There are more than 500 bird species recorded in Kruger, more than any other park in South Africa. Birders have their own checklist to rival the Big Five, called the Big Six.

One of the Big Six is the southern ground hornbill, a big, black bird with long eyelashes and a heavy curved bill. They walk slowly through the grass in a family group hunting snakes, frogs, and insects. Their call is a deep boom that carries for miles and is often mistaken for a lion. Ground hornbills are endangered, breed extremely slowly, and are the subject of an active conservation program in the region.

Another one of the Big Six is the lappet-faced vulture, Africa’s largest vulture. It has a bare pink head and a bill strong enough to open a carcass that no other scavenger can. Vultures are the “cleanup crew” that prevents disease from spreading through the ecosystem—and across Africa they are in catastrophic decline, largely because poachers deliberately poison carcasses to stop circling vultures from revealing a kill site to rangers.

The saddle-billed stork is another one of the Big Six that should be easy to spot in Kruger, because it is the tallest stork in the world! They grow to be five feet tall, with bright red, black, and yellow bills. However, there are only about 25 to 30 breeding pairs in all of Kruger, which makes them rarer than cheetahs or wild dogs.

In case you are wondering, the other three are the kori bustard, one of the heaviest flying birds in the world; the martial eagle, the largest eagle in Africa; and Pel’s fishing owl, a huge ginger-colored owl that hunts fish at night and is so elusive that most visitors never see one.

The Little Five & the Dung Beetle

Guides in Kruger love to spring the Little Five on visitors who have spent three days obsessing over the Big Five. Each one borrows the name of a famous large animal: the elephant shrew, the buffalo weaver, the leopard tortoise, the rhinoceros beetle, and the antlion. It is partly a joke and partly a serious teaching tool, because it forces you to slow down and look at what is actually holding the ecosystem together.

The antlion creates little pits in the sand that look like raindrops. Each one is a trap with a larval antlion waiting at the bottom with its jaws just below the surface. If an insect walks over the edge, the loose sand collapses, and the antlion flicks more sand upward to keep the victim sliding into the pit. As an adult, the antlion transforms into something that looks like a dragonfly.

The elephant shrew is a tiny long-nosed mammal that maintains a network of cleared trails through the leaf litter and patrols them constantly, sweeping them clear so it can run at full speed if a predator appears. Despite the name, it is not a shrew, and genetic evidence places it in a group of African mammals that includes—remarkably—elephants!

The member of the Little Five that deserves the most attention is the dung beetle, and it was in Kruger where scientists proved something extraordinary about it. Dung beetles find fresh dung, roll it into a ball, and push it away in a straight line before other beetles can steal it. For years, researchers knew the beetles used the sun, the moon, and patterns of polarized light to navigate, but then they noticed that on clear, moonless nights, the beetles still rolled perfectly straight. So a team from Lund University in Sweden and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg ran a test. They fitted beetles with tiny cardboard caps to block their view of the sky, and the beetles wandered in circles. They took beetles into a planetarium and switched off individual stars, and the beetles were fine. Then they left only the glowing band of the Milky Way, and the beetles were able to roll straight. Those experiments showed that the dung beetle is the first animal known to navigate by our galaxy! Not by a star, but by the whole band of the Milky Way. Later work found the same beetles can distinguish the brighter and dimmer ends of the galaxy, and that city light pollution disrupts their ability to use it.

The ecological job of the dung beetle is just as impressive. They bury enormous quantities of waste, which recycles nutrients into the soil, aerates it, spreads seeds, and removes the breeding grounds of flies and parasites. A pile of elephant dung can attract thousands of beetles within minutes and disappear in a day.

Hazyview

Another town just outside Kruger National Park is Hazyview, which sits in the middle of enormous banana and macadamia farms.

The dominant culture in this region is Shangaan-Tsonga, and the language is Xitsonga, one of South Africa’s twelve official languages. The Tsonga people (who call themselves Vatsonga) are an old group living across eastern South Africa, southern Mozambique, and parts of Zimbabwe. In the 1820s, during a period of upheaval known as the Mfecane, a Zulu commander named Soshangane (pronunciation) moved north and established a kingdom over many Tsonga-speaking communities. His followers and their descendants became known as Shangaan. Today some people identify as Tsonga, some as Shangaan, and some object to one label or the other. This isn’t a case where one name is “right” and the other “wrong.” Different families use different terms.

A traditional dance performed by the Shangaan-Tsonga is the xibelani (pronunciation), performed by women wearing thick layered skirts called tinguvu that are made specifically for the dance. The name comes from Xitsonga (the language of the Shangaan-Tsonga) and is often translated as something like “hitting to the rhythm.” It is a very fast, difficult dance!

The region is also the home of Shangaan electro, a modern dance music built on extremely fast tempos, sometimes near 190 beats per minute, that grew out of Tsonga disco and has found audiences internationally. This is a good reminder that traditional culture is not frozen. The same communities with centuries-old dances are also producing music that DJs play in Berlin and London.

Elephant Whispers

Near Hazyview is a facility called Elephant Whispers that keeps a small number of African elephants on site and offers close-up educational encounters. Standing next to an elephant at arm’s length is an unforgettable experience, but it raises an important ethical question with no settled answer. Is it right to keep wild animals in captivity so that people can meet them?

Supporters of these facilities point out that most of the elephants in them cannot be released into the wild. Many were orphaned, rescued, or born in captivity and have no herd to return to. They argue that the experience they offer helps visitors become lifelong supporters of elephant conservation.

Critics point out that elephants are among the most cognitively and socially complex animals alive, that they naturally walk many miles a day in large family groups led by a matriarch—and no enclosure can provide that. “Close contact” programs also carry real safety risks for both animals and people.

Thoughtful, well-informed people land in different places on this issue, and the details of a specific facility may matter more than anything else. (This is an excellent opportunity to teach students how to think critically and evaluate competing claims.)

Chimp Eden

Another site near Kruger is the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden—known as Chimp Eden. It is located in the Umhloti Nature Reserve.

Chimpanzees are endangered and are not native to South Africa. Wild chimps live in the forests of central and West Africa, thousands of miles north. Every chimpanzee at Chimp Eden was brought here because something went badly wrong in its life. Chimp Eden opened in 2006 as a home for chimpanzees rescued from the bushmeat trade (the illegal hunting of wild animals for meat, which frequently orphans infants), from the illegal pet trade, and from circuses, beach resorts, and nightclubs where they were kept as entertainment. Many arrived so damaged by isolation that they had to be taught how to climb, how to forage, and—hardest of all—how to be part of a group of other chimpanzees. They now live in large semi-wild enclosures in three social groups. Almost none can ever be returned to the wild.

The sanctuary is part of the network founded by Dr. Jane Goodall, who began studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960 at age 26, with no formal scientific training and her mother as a chaperone. Within months, she made an observation that upended science: she watched a chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard strip the leaves from a twig and use it to fish termites out of a mound, the first known example of an animal other than a human making and using a tool. Her mentor Louis Leakey famously said, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Goodall went on to document chimpanzee personalities, family bonds, cooperation, grief, and warfare—and was criticized early on for giving her subjects names instead of numbers. She spent the rest of her life as a conservationist, traveling roughly 300 days a year, and founded Roots & Shoots, a youth program now active in dozens of countries that helps young people design their own local environmental and community projects. Dr. Goodall died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91, but her institute and sanctuaries continue.

Chimpanzees share roughly 98–99% of our DNA and are, along with bonobos, our closest living relatives.

Return to Johannesburg

The drive back to Johannesburg climbs back up the escarpment, and it is a good stretch of road for thinking about the significance of a place like Kruger.

It is a wilderness that is managed, constantly and expensively. Rangers patrol against poachers, veterinarians dehorn rhinos and treat trapped animals, scientists count populations from the air and study river chemistry, and park managers make hard decisions about whether to fight or allow bush fires and about how to handle drought. Every animal in the park exists partly because of choices people in South Africa made and continue making.

It costs money to maintain Kruger, and most of that money comes from visitors. The tourism funds conservation, but it also creates roads, lodges, and noise inside a wild place.

A few themes emerged from our journey:

• Ecosystems are connected: Elephants knock down trees so grass can grow. Hippos carry nutrients from land into rivers every night. Dung beetles bury waste and fertilize the soil. Vultures stop disease from spreading. Remove any one piece and the whole system has to change.
• Each species matters: Five animals get almost all the attention in Kruger, but the dung beetle may be doing more work than any of them.
• Conservation is a continual project: Kruger exists because of decisions people made, and its future depends on whether the people who live alongside it continue to support it.
• Question what you are told: Hyenas aren’t cowardly scavengers. Nobody actually knows why the white rhino is called “white.” Zebra stripes probably aren’t camouflage. Good science and good history both mean being willing to question popular beliefs.