Down and out. A giraffe darting with a difference.

 

 

 

For more than 2 years I have been contributing back page articles to this magazine and I have also completed a couple of online courses with them.

My biggest Wildlife Campus achievement to date?

Probably the fact that I started a course with them about 20 years ago…and I have yet to complete it!

That being said, I have never missed the monthly deadline for my articles.

This article first appeared in The Wildlife Campus magazine in February 2022.

 

 

 

It all started with a phone call from the owner of a game reserve that I have worked at for decades. They have a family of giraffes that have been on the property and bred successfully for the longest time.

“Come quickly”, said the owner, “Lady (the dominant female) is about to give birth” This galvanized me into grabbing my camera bag as well as throwing some essentials into a suitcase in case it turned out to be a long night. Little did I know how prophetic that would become?

I wanted to get there as quickly as possible to capture the birth from start to finish for the reserve. As it transpired my 23km dash was not as time-sensitive as I thought.

 

 

 

When I got to the reserve, Lady was standing patiently in the open with two legs of her offspring protruding from her vagina. Given the prolonged time that the situation had remained the same, we were worried that the calf might be dead or at the very least severely compromised.

A call to a local vet confirmed what we had suspected, it was a breech birth and the calf was, in all probability, dead. Given the set of circumstances, the vet believed that the mother would have to be euthanized as the property was not set up to capture on do any sort of surgery on her and this was something the reserve owner was prepared to do.

In the meantime, her waters had broken and almost the entire front legs, as far as the shoulders were now visible.

Given the amount of effort that Lady was expending, it was clear that she was close to exhaustion and might not make it through the night.

 

 

 

Dawn broke and we found her standing in almost the exact spot that we had left her the night before. But as luck would have it, we had received a call from a vet who specialized in giraffe and although he was a 3-hour drive away, he was already in his vehicle and on the road to come and help.

 

 

 

He and his capture crew wasted no time when they arrived. Ropes were prepared and the dart gun loaded. Lady was so tired that the M99 anesthetic that can take up to 15 minutes to act knocked her down almost instantaneously.

 

 

 

Time now became critical as the vet only had 20 minutes to remove the remains of the calf and get Lady standing again. If left in a prone position for too long, a giraffe can suffocate and die.

 

 

 

The foetus was quickly removed in a rather gruesome manner that involved using a wire to separate the neck and head from the torso in order facilitate easy withdrawal. It might have seemed callous, but given the time constraints, it was the only way to save Lady.

 

 

 

Having made certain that Lady was internally sound; the foetus was checked as it lay at my feet, still wet with amniotic fluid and encased in its sac. It was a moment of contemplation for all those involved.

Life had been lost, but at the same time, another had been saved. It is the way that nature works and it is what has kept species going for decades.

 

 

 

The reversal drug was administered and, with a little help from a cattle prod and some well-positioned ropes, Lady was quickly up on her feet.

 

 

 

No time for the vet to even have breakfast as he was in a rush to return home to pick up on other cases that he had postponed to come to our rescue. While he was packing up he did mention to me that this was only the 12^th recorded case where a giraffe had survived a breach birth. In the wild, without help, the female would have probably become food for predators or she would have succumbed to sepsis as the foetus decayed in her uterus.

 

 

 

Without so much as a look at her deceased calf, she trotted off to get some food and water as well as to distance herself from unwanted attention from the rest of the herd while she recovered from the ordeal that she had just undergone.

 

 

 

HOWEVER, the story does have a happy ending as almost exactly 18 months to the day she gave birth to a healthy female calf that survived to become part of the family.

Thank you to the vet and his team who saved the  day…and the giraffe.

 

 

 

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