It is easy to overlook smaller creatures while on a safari as we are normally on the lookout for the famous Big Five game animals, but this isn’t Africa’s only famous collection of animals to be seen. Allow us to introduce to you Africa’s less glamorous animals, the warthog, hyena, marabou stork, vulture, and the wildebeest, also, unfortunately, known as The Ugly Five. Although these animals aren’t eye-catching, they all have something unique and fascinating to offer. Open grasslands are their preferred habitat, with their seasonal migration being an optimised survival strategy ensuring their access to fresh resources over wide ranges of areas. The book asks a variety of questions which also encourage children to join in and the book introduced me to animals I had not heard of before like the Marabou Stork.

Marabous are scavengers eating anything from termites, flamingoes, and small birds and mammals to human refuse and dead elephants. They also feed on carcasses with other scavengers such as vultures and hyenas.Vultures are incredible scavengers. So much so that they are often referred to as ‘nature’s cleanup crew’. If there is a carcass in the wild, you will find them soaring above or gorging themselves until they have eaten as much as they can. They then sit in a half-sleep state to digest their food like people after a celebratory meal 🙂 Their faces are pointy with strange-looking snouts, and their tusks aren’t exactly pretty. Then there’s their leathery skin which is peppered with exactly the wrong amount of coarse hair. Wildebeests may not be easy on the eyes, but they’re not terribly unattractive when compared to the other animals on this list. Besides, an ugly wildebeest wouldn’t know how ‘ugly’ it was, as their eyesight is extremely poor. Donaldson’s story does not quite have the high level of imagination that we have come to know, but this does allow Scheffler’s illustrations to shine even more than usual. Fans of his work will already know the style and it is reflected again here. The bonus is that Scheffler is drawing real wildlife and he does it brilliantly. The Ugly Five are all given a personality, whilst still not being the most pretty to look at. The plains of the savannah are home to some of the world’s most majestic creatures, but this is not a book about them. This is a book about the other animals that don’t always get the limelight; the dumpy, the lumpy and the smelly. When five less than pretty animals get together they all decide that they are the ugliest creatures around. Can anyone love a face as hideous as theirs?

When asked to vote thumbs up or thumbs down, Dragonflies class (Year 2) polled a mixture of thumbs up, thumbs down and thumbs in the middle. Dominic thought it was boring, but liked the pictures of the funny animals. Brandon thought it was too long and wasn’t funny. Maia liked “seeing animals I’ve never seen before”.I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). These animals are normally found in groups and they spend most of their time in search of food. Warthogs are members of the pig family and are widely distributed across Africa. These animals sleep underground in burrows which they steal from other animals such as the aardvark. When running through grass their tails stand up straight, and when in danger these animals choose to run, rather than fight. However, they don’t only scavenge for their food. They’re skilled hunters, too. In fact, they’re part of the most successful predators in Africa. Yet for better or worse, these five have earned themselves an unfortunate place in the official Ugly Five listing.