A guide’s job is to help you understand what you are seeing in the wild, effectively telling you the story of the bush. 

When training to be a guide, a great technique to help you with taking a sighting is to look at a random photo that you have never seen before, and then interpret what you see, weaving it all into a story.

Here’s our attempt. If you fancy having a go we’d love to hear any of your thoughts.

Have a look at how 5 out of the 6 giraffes are feeding on what looks like grass. You would be forgiven for thinking that giraffe do eat both grass and leaves, but what is actually happening here is a little more interesting.

If you look carefully at some of the taller trees dotted about there is a noticeable line on them, which is known as the browse line. You sometimes see this more distinctly in areas where there are a lot of goats, or maybe in your garden where you can see the deer have been eating your roses.

Here, that browse line is really high, and when we consider that a male giraffe is about a metre taller than a female, we can work out the answer to why some of the giraffe look like they’re feeding on grass.

The five low-feeding giraffe are most likely all females or young males who can’t quite reach the browse line. They’re not actually eating grass but feeding from the small shrubs you can see in the bottom left of the image.

It’s also interesting to note that one giraffe has its head up while the others are all down, now this might be a complete coincidence, but it could also be in indication that one of them is trying to keep an eye out for predators, realistically with giraffe it’s only lions that could hunt them.

Or, it could just be that this giraffe has been feeding on a lower shrub but had to bring its head back up to avoid too much blood rushing to the brain. Did you know: giraffe have a special network of expandable capillaries near their brains which almost act like a sponge to slow reduce the arterial pressure, preventing brain damage when their heads are lowered.

Again, it could be something different, and in fact a male who is trying to charm his way into a group of ladies. If he thought a female was in oestrous he would raise his top lip which would activate his vomeronasal organ which would help him detect if she was coming into heat.

If we were right about the lions, well, we might just want to sit tight for a bit and see what happens.