The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals

Taking pictures of the Big 5 is great fun on a safari. However, too many safari-goers simply take pictures without understanding the animals they're observing. A lot of guidebooks give you information on how to identify a species, but don't really tell you much about the animals themselves (and unfortunately most guides and drivers aren't much help either). Richard Estes' The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals Including Hoofed Mammals, Carnivores, and Primates is a great remedy to this. Estes treats the major African mammals with the detail of a graduate biology textbook, explaining their evolutionary history, diet, and behavior. Each chapter follows a set, easy-to-follow pattern with key information. They also include a pictorial guide to each animal's behaviors (with images of how, for example, hyenas behave when they're submissive).While other guidebooks might cover the information on elephants and giraffes, Estes' passion is antelopes and it shows in this book. Many other guidebooks and safari guides consider antelopes the "junk" game animals, but Estes shows that they are a fascinating and successful group of animals. I learned to appreciate Thompsons Gazelles and Oryx a whole lot more after reading this book. In fact, the section on antelopes alone is worth the price of the book.Estes' book is heavy - as befitting a book so packed with information - so you should probably take a smaller, more traditional wildlife checklist on your safari (I recommend Wildlife of East Africa (Princeton Illustrated Checklists), which I used in Uganda and Kenya). However, Estes' book is necessary if you want to go beyond simply a photography expedition and actually learn about African mammals.

More then a simple field guide, this book focuses on East African mammalian behavior and social organizations. Much contemporary research on mammalian behavior informs the chapters. Line drawings take the place of the color photographs (that you would find in many other guides), which give it a nice retro feel. Nevertheless, it has a modern organizational schema with lots of boldfaced subheading and bullet points which make it easy to find information quickly. There are icon-based labels that allows the reader to identify the characteristics of each species social organization. Descriptions of social organization, play, courtship behaviors, territoriality, parenting patterns allow observers to interpret their observations in the field while on safari. It's like having a naturalist along with you, pointing out the subtleties of animal behaviors and communication.In some parts of the book, there is specific information about wildlife populations. For example, in the section on Spotted Hyenas, the author reports data from one female that was tracked with a radio collar in the Ngorongoro Crater, noting how starkly different the level of activity necessary to find food was compared to hyenas in Kalhari Gemsbock National Park, where food is harder to come by. This level of scientific detail nicely complements the comprehensive descriptions of each species life and environment.I ended buying this after borrowing it from my local library. I also purchased a Princeton Pocket Guide to Wildlife of East Africa by Withers and Hosking full of colored photos - mostly because of its vast listing of birds that are not in the Safari Companion. The Princeton Guide also has photos of many reptiles. It is clear that I will learn the most from the Safari Companion, however.

This book is packed full of interesting information about each species of mammal, including behavioral traits not covered in the usual field-guide. It plays no favorites and spends no more time on elephants and lions than on obscure kinds of antelope one is unlikely to see on your usual safari. The completeness makes it a bit large to carry around easily. The one big disappointment (not obvious from the blurb or reviews) is that it contains no colored plates, but is illustrated by line drawings. For identification purposes one really needs another guidebook. Leave this one back at camp and read it after seeing the animal.