Just when you thought nature couldn’t get any more amazing, this video emerges.
A pair of white giraffes have been spotted for the first time by conversationists in Kenya. The mother and child reticulated giraffes were filmed in the Ishaqbini Hirola Conservancy in Kenya’s Garissa county and have been fascinating viewers of the footage ever since.
The rarely-seen creatures suffer from a genetic condition called leucism, which causes a partial loss of pigmentation in an animal. Unlike albinism, leucism can cause white or patchy-colored skin, hair or feathers, but the pigment cells in the eyes are not affected by the condition.
According the Hirola Conservation Programme, white giraffes have only been seen twice in the wild before. The very first report of a white giraffe in the wild was in January 2016 in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania. This was followed by a second sighting in March 2016, also in Garissa county, Kenya.
The HCP said that local rangers first told them about the white giraffes in June this year. They managed to capture footage of the animals two months later.
“They were so close and extremely calm and seemed not disturbed by our presence,” the organization said in a blog post. “The mother kept pacing back and forth a few yards in front of us while signaling the baby giraffe to hide behind the bushes – a characteristic of most wildlife mothers in the wild to prevent the predation of their young.”
The conservationists added that sightings of white giraffes in the area have increased in the past few years, much to the delight of locals.
“As a matter of fact, these sightings have become a common occurrence in the Hirola’s geographic range that the communities in these areas (especially within our conservancies) have become so excited to a point where everybody has been participating in reporting the sighting of these magnificent animals!” they wrote.
