Did you know that warthogs slept in bunk beds?  And that kingfishers’ wings had no colour?  And that mommy scorpions were excellent nannies? 

No, I didn’t know either (although I did suspect that bit about the scorpions.  Something had to be keeping the species going).   But all of these fascinating facts, and a lot more besides, can be found in a book called ‘Game Ranger in Your Backpack’.    It’s a large, luscious book, crammed with pictures and drawings and hundreds of nicely presented interesting facts.  It’s the work of a naturalist, educator and communicator called Megan Emmett who I discovered on the Internet through her blog ‘Babe in the Bush’ and I was so intrigued by her that I decided to contact her for a chat. Megan comes across at first like a large and ungainly puppy, the type that jumps up on you with huge muddy paws.   However, there is a keen intellect and appetite for hard work that underlies this energy, and together it makes a very attractive and engaging package.    Shy and retiring she ain’t, and it is obvious that she has decided that she is her own best advert.  It works. Megan was always interested in nature and studied as much as she could.  However, it wasn’t good enough to gain the knowledge herself – her exuberant personality meant that she simply had to share it with other people.  So she went into tour guiding and educational outings. “I did some tours with Africa Geographic,” she says, “where we took groups to the Kruger National Park.  It was great fun – here we had a bunch of Sandton housewives drinking wine and looking at trees and having the most glorious time.” But Megan yearned for a wider audience and eventually drifted into television, where she became an adviser to wildlife documentary makers whose work was featured on series such as Animal Planet and Survival.  She is now a researcher and production assistant on the revised television series 50/50 but her most impressive achievement has been the book ‘Game Ranger in Your Backpack’. The book is a hefty 352 pages and is far too large to be slipped into a bag or pocket when you are packing for safari.  But it is difficult to see how the book could be smaller and still contain the vast amount of information – presented in a charming mix of the scientific and the chatty.  This edition, unfortunately, is also limited to the Lowveld, obviously because Kruger is the one game reserve that people are most likely to visit.  It would be nice to see subsequent editions that are devoted to other parts of the country. So this large tome is going to get extremely dog-eared when you carry it around on your wildlife trail or game drive, because carry it around is exactly what you are going to do.  It fills a very nice gap between the smaller field guides (which are of necessity limited to a picture of the animal or plant in question and perhaps a sentence or two about it), and the large doorstops of scientific information that explain the gestation habits of hippos in perhaps more detail than you would want.  It cannot hope to feature everything but it does a decent job of covering most of the bases.  Each animal is represented by sufficient pictures to make identification very easy – and Megan has cunningly put in enough baby pictures to make any wildlife stalker go quite gooey.  There are close-ups of distinguishing marks, little boxes with short descriptions and interesting facts, sufficient scenitific terminology to make you feel you are getting the real thing, and enough quirky detail to give the impression that you have a personable and knowledgeable human guide right beside you. The book might be written by Megan but it would be poorer indeed without the photographs taken by wildlife photographer, Sean Pattrick.  Not only are they very good photographs but they convey a great deal of charm.  Even the boomslang and the furry ants manage to look attractive. The information ranges widely:  from animals that are enormous (elephants are about the only animals that use babysitters) to tiny (cocktail ants stick up their tails when threatened), from the noticeable (giraffes wear earrings in the shape of oxpeckers) to the invisible (cicadas use cryptic colouring to hide).   There are the noisy to the silent (owls fly without noise as a result of the frayed feathers on their wings that break up the air instead of slicing it like other birds).  There are trees and flowers and insects and even a few rocks and geological features thrown in for good measure.  The book is extremely well laid out, with colour coding, highlighted words for easy reading, a logical flow of information, little blocks of information for easy access and browsing.   Despite its size, it is the sort of thing that you are really going to want to take with you when you next go to the game reserve.  The book can be ordered online or found at any good bookstore.