Serengeti Scramble Squares®

Description

The sophisticated colors of the realistic Serengeti Scramble Squares® puzzle make it among the best selling styles of Scramble Squares® overall, appreciated by enthusiasts of African art and nature, naturalists and conservationists. This puzzle is also especially popular with children.

Fascinating Facts

The Serengeti Plain is the world’s most wondrous wild animal habitat. The Masai people, nomadic cattle herders on the Serengeti Plain for centuries, call the place Siringet, which means “an extended place.”

Extending westward from the foothills of Mount Kilimanjero to the eastern shore of Lake Victoria 150 miles below the equator in eastern Africa along the northern border of the United Republic of Tanzania, this unique environment is home to more than 450 species of wild birds, including flamingos and ostriches, and an enormous array of exotic wild mammals. The crystal clear rarefied mile high air provides spectacular, seemingly prehistoric, settings for elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, zebras, cheetahs, lions, leopards, buffalo, wildebeest, gazelles, jackals, hyenas, hippopotamuses, wart hogs, crocodiles, mongooses, baboons, monkeys, and spitting cobras. On the Serengeti, lions boldly survey the open grasslands, and the almost extinct black rhino still throws his weight around. One fifth of Africa’s more than ten million wild mammals live in and around the 5,100 acres of Serengeti National Park on the Serengeti Plain. After the rainy season, which begins in late November, occasionally there occurs “The Great Migration,” when a vast herd of animals grazes the new vegetation of the short grass plain, completely filling an area which is thirty miles long and twenty miles wide!

In 1956, Dr. Bernhard Grzimek, the director of the Frankfort Zoo and a celebrity on German television, and his son Michael offered the government of Tanganyika money to buy land on the Serengeti Plain for a national park where the animals would be the priority and humans would only be visitors. The final boundaries of the Park were established in 1959. In 1964, Tanganyika joined the island of Zanzibar to form the Republic of Tanzania. Author of the book and the Academy Award winning film entitled, “Serengeti Will Not Die,” the Grzimek’s were the first to catalog the wildlife on the Serengeti Plain. Michael was killed in an airplane crash while pursuing his study of this vast wilderness.

Today, scientists from the Serengeti Research Institute use computer technology, aerial photography and other scientific equipment and techniques to monitor the animal population and the ecological balance within Serengeti National Park. The scientists divide the animal population into two main groups: carnivores, the predators, and herbivores, the prey. The abundant and resilient vegetation nourishes the herbivores, and the herbivores nourish the carnivores. The Serengeti ecosystem overall, including Serengeti National Park, spans an area of 15,000 square miles of grassland plains and Acadia woods, crossed by streams flowing into alkaline basins and Lake Victoria.