Ivan and the Eland

This is a followup to yesterday’s post about our photo safari at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Josie (our driver) commented on our post, and asked for pictures of Ivan and the eland. Ask, Josie, and ye shall receive!

Ivan is the rather large male giraffe in the photos at right, and the eland (a Patterson’s Eland) is the roughly one ton antelope that Ivan is bullying. Yup, Ivan’s a big old bully. He just herded that poor eland around wherever he wanted it to go. I’m sure the eland isn’t used to such bullying, as he’s rather big and bad himself — but what are you going to do when you have Ivan after you? I know that if I had Ivan’s big, bony head swinging at me like a spiked wrecking ball, I’d probably get all humble, too. And then there’s those monster hooves, which Jeanne (our guide) told us can go whizzing around at very high speed, doing lots of damage to things like rib cages, skulls, and tank armor (I added that last category myself after seeing one of Ivan’s hooves up close and personal).

What is a little hard to absorb from these photos is the scale of the tussle going on. In motion, we saw two rather ponderous beasts dancing in slow motion; ponderous really only because of their size. In some of the other photos (in my original post), you can see Ivan’s head as he feeds from Debbie’s hands — it is enormous! Now look in the photos at right, and even though Ivan’s head is bigger than the eland’s head, that eland is still darned big. It’s the size of a fairly large cow — and look how Ivan towers over him. That poor eland couldn’t poke Ivan in the ribs no matter how hard he tried…

As usual, click on the small photos at right to get a larger version…