How to spot me

Don't let my name fool you: I'm actually grey. My skin often takes on the colour of the mud I've been wallowing in. I carry two horns: my front horn is 0.5–1.3 m long, and my rear horn can grow up to 55 cm.

The surest way to recognise me is my mouth. I have a pointed, hooked upper lip that works almost like a finger, so I can grasp leaves and twigs and pull them in to eat.

Where I live

I can make my home in a wide range of places, from desert to wetter, forested mountain areas. I do best where 350–700 mm of rain falls a year, and I need permanent water unless there are plenty of succulent plants to eat.

In South Africa I live on more than 69 state, private and community reserves, which together cover less than 3% of the country. Two kinds of us occur naturally here:

• South-central black rhino (D. b. minor): the Lowveld of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and parts of North West.
• South-western black rhino (D. b. bicornis): the arid west and south, in the Northern, Western and Eastern Cape.

How I live and what I eat

I mostly keep to myself. If you see a few of us together, it's usually a mother with her calf. How far I roam depends on how much food there is: under 10 km² in rich thicket, 15–60 km² in woody savanna and well over 100 km² in desert.

I'm a browser, and I feed mostly below 2 m. If I eat grass, it's usually by accident.

How I raise my young

A mother carries a single calf for 15 to 16 months. She has her first calf at about 7 years old, then one roughly every 2.7 years, and her calf stays by her side for 2.5 to 5 years. Because we breed so slowly, every one of us lost to poaching is very hard to replace.

What I'm up against

Poaching for my horn is the biggest threat I face. When a mother is killed, her calf is often left alive and alone. But protection works: in South Africa we've grown from about 110 in 1930 to 2,065 in 2023.

How to spot me

I have soft, silky fur, a cream belly and throat, and a woolly, pale brown tail that darkens towards the tip. Look for my giveaway mark: a black stripe running from the corner of my mouth across my cheek. Our females are slightly larger than our males.

Where I live

You'll only find me in the central Karoo, in the Northern and Western Cape. I shelter in the dense bush along seasonal rivers, on deep, soft river soil, often on floodplains just 100–200 m wide. Nine of our twelve known groups live north of the Great Escarpment; the other three are in the Breede, Gouritz and Olifants river catchments.

I'm so closely tied to these rivers that, where we've been studied, there's roughly one of us for every 400 m of river.

How I live and what I eat

I come out at night and live alone. By day I rest in a shallow scrape under a Karoo bush, so well hidden that I'm very hard to find. A male's home range is about 15 hectares and overlaps with the ranges of females.

I nibble the leaves and flowers of riverside shrubs, including salt-loving plants, and eat grasses when the rains come.

How I raise my young

I'm the only indigenous burrowing rabbit in Africa. A mother raises her young in an underground chamber she lines with fur and grass, dug into stable river soil. We breed from August to May. After a pregnancy of 35–36 days, a mother has one litter a year of one or two babies, born blind and hairless and weighing just 40–50 g.

What I'm up against

• In 2016 only 157 to 207 mature rabbits like me were left, split into about 12 groups, none with more than 50 adults.
• Between 40% and 60% of my river-floodplain home has been lost, mainly to crop farming, and overgrazing thins the bush I need.
• Climate change could shrink our northern population's habitat by up to 89%.
• Because each mother raises so few young, our numbers recover very slowly.

How to spot me

I'm the only penguin that breeds in Africa. My back is black and my front mostly white, with a black band shaped like an upside-down U across my chest. Every one of us has our own pattern of black spots on the belly.

Look for the pink, bare skin above each of my eyes, the white band that curves from my forehead around my black cheeks, and my strong, hooked black bill with a pale band. Our females are slightly smaller than our males. When we're young we're grey-blue all over, without these markings.

You might also know me as the "jackass penguin".

Where I live

I live along the cold, food-rich Benguela coast. We breed only on offshore islands from central Namibia to Algoa Bay in the Eastern Cape, plus two mainland sites on the Western Cape coast. When we're young, we can travel 1,800 km from where we hatched.

How I live and what I eat

We breed together in colonies and hunt at sea for shoaling fish such as pilchards and anchovies, and small squid.

Once a year I moult, replacing all my feathers. I can't feed while I moult, so I stay on land and fatten up first; the whole process takes about 14 weeks.

How I raise my young

We breed throughout the year. A pair of us lays two eggs in a burrow, under bushes, between rocks or in the open, and our chicks hatch after about 39 days. We once dug our burrows into thick layers of guano (seabird droppings); scraping it off for fertiliser disturbed our colonies, and it is no longer allowed. We first breed at about 4 years old.

What I'm up against

• Our breeding pairs fell from about 44,300 in 1993 to about 9,900 in 2023, a 78% drop in 30 years. Our numbers have more than halved in the last decade.
• Scientists link the decline to changes in how much of our main prey fish is available near our colonies.
• Our Eastern Cape colonies are falling fastest, by about 13% a year over the last decade. If this continues, the 30-year decline is expected to pass 80% by 2028.

How to spot me

I'm a small, flattened frog, and I spend my whole life in water. My back is marked with dark lengthwise bands: two broad bands down my back and a weaker, broken band on each side, often with a pale line along the middle. My belly is dotted with dark spots, and the undersides of my thighs are ochre.

I'm easily confused with my common cousin, the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). I'm smaller, with a smaller, more pointed head, and I don't have the small tentacle my cousin has below each eye.

Where I live

I live only in the far south-west of South Africa, between 10 and 140 m above sea level and within 10 km of the coast. My known homes are on the Cape Peninsula (including the Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park), on the Cape Flats, near Kleinmond and Pearly Beach, and in Agulhas National Park.

My ponds are dark and acidic: our tadpoles have been found in coffee-coloured water with a pH of 5.

How I live and what I eat

By day I hide in the mud or leaf litter at the bottom of my pond. When a pond dries up, I can survive buried in the mud or sheltering under logs, and now and then I set off overland to find a new pond. I eat mostly the tadpoles of other frogs, almost exactly the same food as the African clawed frog.

How I raise my young

I breed in cool water, starting earlier in the year than the African clawed frog, with our tadpoles seen from late July. Our tadpoles grow slowly in the cold water, taking around 120 days to become frogs. We're sensitive to heat and show distress above about 27 °C.

What I'm up against

• Competition: I eat the same food as the African clawed frog.
• Predation: Cape platannas like me have been found inside the stomachs of African clawed frogs.
• Hybridisation: my cousins and I interbreed. Near Kleinmond about 27% of frogs are hybrids. Male hybrids are sterile, and a 2017 genetic study found the hybrids rarely breed on, so the main harm is wasted breeding effort.
• My home: urban development, farm run-off and invasive alien plants threaten my ponds.

There's good news too. SANParks removes African clawed frogs from the Cape of Good Hope ponds, and since monitoring began there in 2010, more young Cape platannas have been recorded.

How to spot me

I'm built like a sprinter: a slim body, narrow waist, deep chest and long legs. Two features tell me apart from a leopard at a glance:

• My solid black spots. A leopard's spots are open rosettes; mine are solid dots.
• My black "tear marks", running from the inner corner of each eye down to my mouth.

My long tail ends in a bushy tuft with five or six dark rings, and my claws only partly retract, gripping the ground like running spikes. Every cheetah's coat pattern is unique, so researchers can recognise each of us from photographs.

Where I live

We once lived across most of southern Africa but have disappeared from 88% of our former range in the region. Worldwide we survive in just 9% of our historic range.

In South Africa I live in three kinds of places:

• Farmland and ranches along the northern borders and the western edge of Kruger, where about 400–800 of us roam free
• Large parks: Kruger and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
• Fenced reserves in the managed metapopulation, including reserves in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng and Free State

I need a very large area to find enough food and to meet others of my kind.

How I live and what I eat

I hunt by stalking close, then sprinting: I can reach up to 112 km/h and go from standstill to 96 km/h in about three seconds, using my tail like a rudder for sharp turns. I trip my prey and kill with a suffocating bite to the throat.

Brothers from the same litter often stay together for life in a coalition, which helps us hunt and look out for each other. Young males leave and roam for a few years before settling in a territory.

How I raise my young

After a pregnancy of 93 days, a mother has a litter of usually one to six cubs. Sadly, very few of us survive: fewer than one in ten cubs makes it through the first stage of life in the wild. Cubs stay with their mother until they're 18 to 22 months old.

What I'm up against

• Conflict with farmers is my main threat outside protected areas, where cheetahs are killed to protect livestock.
• Illegal trade in wild-caught cheetahs is an emerging threat.
• On reserves, lions are my biggest danger: one study found predation, mostly by lions, caused 39% of known cheetah deaths.
• Fences keep me safe but stop me moving between reserves to find a mate.

To help us, the Endangered Wildlife Trust began in 2011 to manage the cheetahs on fenced reserves as one connected population, moving us between reserves to keep it healthy. By January 2015 this metapopulation held 308 cheetahs on 53 reserves, and we survived better on these reserves once moves were coordinated. Livestock guarding dogs help farmers protect their herds without harming us.

How to spot me

I'm named for my very large head, big in proportion to my body, with thick, powerful jaws. My shell is reddish-brown. Each of my flippers has two claws, and the plates of my shell (scutes) sit side by side rather than overlapping. Our females are generally larger; our males have longer tails that reach well past the shell.

Where I live

I live in warm oceans around the world. In South Africa we nest on the beaches of iSimangaliso Wetland Park in northern KwaZulu-Natal, from the Mozambique border south to Mabibi, with the most nests between Kosi Mouth and Dog Point. A few of us nest as far south as Sodwana, Cape Vidal and St Lucia.

How I live and what I eat

As a hatchling I drift in the open ocean, feeding on small animals near the surface. As an adult I feed on the sea floor, using my strong jaws to crush the shells of crabs and molluscs.

Our mothers often come back to nest on the very beach where they hatched.

How I start life, and my long swim south

In South Africa, our mothers come ashore to nest from October to March and lay about 112 eggs per clutch. The temperature of the sand decides whether a hatchling is male or female: warmer nests produce more females. We usually dig our way out after sunset.

Then the warm Agulhas Current carries us south. Near the southern tip of Africa the current slows and turns back, and onshore winds push young turtles like me towards the coast, where the water can drop from about 25 °C to 12 °C. The cold shock leaves many of us stranded on southern beaches between March and June.

What I'm up against

In South Africa we're a conservation success: about 107 females nested a year in 1963–1965, and today more than 650 do.

But my first year is still dangerous. In April 2024, more than 240 stranded loggerheads reached the Two Oceans Aquarium's Turtle Conservation Centre in just four days. Over April and May it took in more than 600 of us, so many that the centre grew from about 120 places to almost 400. Many of us arrive cold, weak or injured.