Cricket and I went to a game reserve near San Francisco and we’re going to delve deep into that but first! Art! Really good art!
We went to the Museum of Design one of the days we were in San Fran. Important information: The Museum of Design is TINY. It’s one and a half rooms. That’s it. We walked there twice – the first day we walked three miles and got lost and the second day we walked three miles and made it to the museum. Which, due to them changing out the exhibitions, was only one room. One room. Cricket started laughing so hard I had to walk away from him so I could silently fume in a corner. However, all was not lost. The one exhibition was a clay artist I had never heard of, Gustavo Perez. His work was amazing, very fluid but also mathematical. It reminded me a little of the design style of the atomic age. Perez had a display on a shelf.
And one that covered the entire floor.
I did research into his work and I have a new favorite clay artist. Perez manipulates the clay in a way that makes it abundantly clear that he is in complete control of his medium. If there’s an exhibition of Perez’s work near you I recommend you checking it out.
Okay, game park. The climate in the hills outside of San Fran is very similar to the savannah in South Africa. So there’s a game park with no major predators, some cheetahs but nothing bigger. Lots of antelope (which I love, a vastly underappreciated ungulate group). I took a bazillion pictures. Get ready because here we go.
Did you know there were different types of giraffe? Most people do not. This place had two types. The dark one was a Maasai giraffe, very big, and another was a Rothschild’s giraffe, he was fourteen months old and he had a massive crush on the Maasai giraffe who was almost twice his size. He kept coming over and gently hitting his head into Mrs. Maasai’s neck and eventually she would get irritated and saunter off.
There were three rhinos. In one pen was a male and a female rhino but they were just friends, not mating like the game park would like them to. So off to the side in a smaller pen was a male they had brought in in the hopes that the lady rhino would find him sexy. The female had a straight horn which is something I’ve never seen before (but to be honest I don’t look at many rhino horns). It has to do with the way she rubbed her horn on various surfaces. Since it’s compressed hair it wears pretty easily.
And here’s the new male. Look at his sweet little hairy flower ears.
There was a herd of ankole cows. You’ve seen them before. They have crazy huge horns. They live with the Watusi tribe and were bred to look like this. There’s no real purpose. Let’s quickly go through the different between antlers and horns. Antlers are solid and fall off every year. Horns are permanent, filled with spongy bone and are used mostly to cool down the blood before it reaches the brain. It’s also useful for scratching your rump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpY7S1N3Kg8
Neat fact: Santa’s sleigh is pulled by reindeer, right? And all the reindeer who pull the sleigh are assumed to be male, right? Nope. Males shed their antlers in the fall and females shed theirs much later in winter therefore the reindeer pulling the sleigh are all female.
Okay, back to ankole. When they get up and walk around they make a great bonking noise as their horns tap one another.
Near the ankole was a solitary black angus cow (which looked super-small next to these massive-horned bovines) with a solitary black angus calf. Hanging out like they were part of the herd.
The story I got on that was that one day this black angus female showed up from a ranch nearby. The game park keepers called the ranch-owner and he said he would come pick his cow soon. But he never did. And when she wandered over she was pregnant and now she’s part of the ankole herd. So that’s that.
Way over on the other side was more ambling herbivores. There were eland which is the heaviest antelope in Africa. A full-grown male can be 2100 pounds. Big boy. The male looks weird with hanging skin and lumpy humps. The females are pretty and sweet-looking. They lived in an enclosure with zebra and a few waterbuck. We arrived at one of their feeding times so everyone sauntered over to the feed bowls.
This is a picture of a mother waterbuck with her baby. This picture is exciting because this is the first time the baby had been seen.
All the above-mentioned herbivores were herbivoring when someone massive and imposing started approaching the food bowls. All of a sudden everyone had something important to do somewhere else.
It was a male cape buffalo. Cape buffaloes are a notoriously skittish and aggressive. Rhinos, when you approach them, will run away and rhinos are tanks. Cape buffalo will start crap for no reason. That explains why when the single solitary buffalo walked up to a bunch of animals that weighed forty times what he weighed they all left. Look at the zebra’s body language. “Nope.”
There was a herd of cape buffalo. The guide clearly said, “If you drop anything like a phone or glasses don’t get out of the vehicle. I will get them for you. Except if you drop it in the cape buffalo area. If you drop it in the cape buffalo area it is their possession now.”
We saw other land critters as well. There were wildebeest:
And a gemsbok:
And some red river hogs (and a tortoise). Team Red River Hogs forever. Big fan.
Next entry: Birds and the end of San Francisco.
