Card #019 · Mammals
Masai giraffe
Giraffa tippelskirchi
Super Rare EN · Endangered
Field notes
- Classification
- Order Artiodactyla · Family Giraffidae
- Range
- Kenya and Tanzania, with an isolated Zambian population
- Size
- Up to 5.8 m (19 ft) tall
- Weight
- Bulls to ~1,300 kg (2,900 lb)
- Lifespan
- ~30 yrs (wild)
- Diet
- Acacia leaves, browse
Most Notable
Until 2025 every giraffe on Earth was filed as one species. The IUCN now recognises four, and this is one of them, listed Endangered after losing roughly half its number in three decades.
Giraffes are said to sleep half an hour a night. That figure is really their REM sleep. Accelerometers on wild giraffe in Namibia logged about nine minutes of it a night, in bouts of a couple of minutes, head tipped back onto the rump. Ordinary drowsing runs hours longer.
This card exists because of a decision made in August 2025. The IUCN split the giraffe into four species: northern, reticulated, Masai and southern. Before that, every giraffe alive was filed under one name, and the familiar Vulnerable listing belonged to that single lumped species.
You can tell a Masai giraffe by its edges. The spots are jagged and irregular, like torn oak leaves, running all the way down to the hooves, where other giraffes carry rounder or more sharply bordered patches.
The tongue is up to 50 cm long and does the work of a hand, stripping leaves from between acacia thorns that nothing else on the savanna can reach.
Zambia has its own population, cut off in the Luangwa Valley, which is now treated as a subspecies of the Masai giraffe rather than a giraffe of its own.
Range: Kenya and Tanzania, plus Zambia's Luangwa Valley.