White Giraffes Caught on Video

For the first time ever, white giraffes have been caught on video. Back in June, a villager in Kenya came upon the extremely rare white giraffes — a female and a baby — near the Ishaqbini Hirola Conservancy and reported the sighting to local rangers, the New York Times reports. The founder of the Hirola Conservation Program then went to the Conservancy and shot video footage. “They were so close and extremely calm and seemed not disturbed by our presence," Hirola wrote on its Web site. "The mother kept pacing back and forth a few yards in front of us while signaling the baby giraffe to hide behind the bushes.”

White giraffes have been spotted only a few times in recent years. One was seen in April 2016 in Garissa County in Kenya and another was spotted in January of that year at the Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. That giraffe, named Omo after a local laundry detergent, had appeared a year earlier as a calf. White giraffes are leucistic, not albino, meaning some of their cells can produce color, such as those in their eyes. Their rarity makes them a target for poachers. Giraffes as a species have been declared "vulnerable" to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The giraffe population has decline by 40% over the last three decades. (More giraffes stories.)