Page 34 - Blue Valley News 2 2021

NATURE

THE YEAR OF THE ZEBRA

By James Clarke, Photography by Mary Broadley

ne of the most notable things we sure which, is said to be more alert than the we were able to get quite close. They were
found in rain-soaked Kruger Park other and likely to spot a predator in time. unfazed and we were able to study them and
Olast month was the high number of Certainly, you will never catch zebra, all heads wonder anew what their bizarre stripes were
zebras. Oh yes, and of course how green it down at the same time, grazing. There’ll all about.
was. I cannot recall seeing so much vigorous always be some on the lookout.
growth and so much water even after the Nobody really knows. Each animal has
Millennium Flood. Our observations were, of course, highly a different pattern – a bit like human
subjective for we only had access to the fingerprints. Science has established that
The grass was as high as an elephant’s eye southwestern corner between the Phabeni zebras are, basically, white animals with
and 2021 is surely going to be noted in the Gate and Skukuza. All the sand roads were black stripes and not the other way around.
park as the year of the zebras. I have never closed. And they can raise the hairs along the black
seen so many. stripes but not the white hairs in between.
We’d visited the park three months earlier
One tends to take the Burchell’s zebra, the to report on the effects of the collapse in But why would evolution have left them so
plains zebra, for granted. It is a species tourism and the closure of camps. Panic vividly striped when all other four-legged
instantly recognised and associated with Dam near Skukuza - the park’s premier hide animals have developed cryptically-coloured
Africa all over the world. - was padlocked. We feared it would still be hides? One suggestion is that the stripes
closed this time but, to our joy, the gate was break up the animal’s image and that
The zebra’s favourite grazing companions, unlocked. A notice announced that only predators viewing a herd cannot sort out
the blue wildebeest, appeared to be totally 10 people were allowed at a time, though an individual to attack. Can that be true? If
outnumbered this season, maybe by as nobody was around to count. Under normal so, how is it that zebras rate so highly on the
much as 10 to one. The two tend to graze circumstances the hide can take three or four lion’s menu?
together because zebra prefer taller grasses times that number. Twice, on separate days,
and this opens up the shorter stuff favoured we had the entire hide to ourselves. A more popular theory is that pests such
by wildebeest. as biting insects are put off by the stripes.
But it was the sight of so many zebras that Another is that it helps them control their
Their association is also said to have a survival enthralled us. Whenever we saw zebra, temperature.
purpose because one of them, and I am not mostly in small herds and at the roadside,

32 • Issue 2 2021 • BLUE VALLEY NEWS