Answers to the African Animal Tournament

[FlyingJoe]

In case you wanted to know the answers, I'm posting them here. I'm
including how often they were found as well.

Board #1:
- Buffalo 15 (although most people found 2 of the
animals
- Giraffe 17 in this board, only 6 people got all 3)
- Warthog 15

Board #2:
- Anteater 1 (admittedly, an Anteater is also an
Aardvark
- Antelope 10 but I was running out of African
Animals!) :-)
- Elephant 8

Board #3:
- Baboon 13
- Hippopotamus 9
- Lion 22

Board #4:
- Alligator 7 (did you know that all of the letters in
'gorilla'
- Gorilla 9 are also in "Alligator'?)
- Impala 3

Board #5:
- Aardvark 7 (the most misspelled word in the bunch, 4
times)
- Jackal 8
- Leopard 5

Board #6:
- Crocodile 6 (why was this one hard to find?)
- Rhinoceros 14
- Lemur 1 (or Lion 21)

Board 7:
- Gazelle 14
- Wildebeest 4 (I'm impressed that anyone found this one)
- Zebra 13

Board #8:
- Cheetah 9
- Chimpanzee 14
- Hyena 6 (this one was hard to notice)

[plover]

This was fun.

I'm not sure how I decided "croc" was an artifact on #6 and didn't
look for "crocodile" -- especially given that I looked for it on other
boards.

"Wildebeest" was one of things I was looking for from the beginning,
as was "cheetah", so, of course, you put them at the end.

For what it's worth, "anteater" is indeed another name for an
aardvark, but the animals officially called anteaters are South and
Central American. Also, on #6, I think I figured there must be
something in Africa that gets called a "condor", even though actual
condors are in this hemisphere. I appear to have been wrong about that
one.

What, no love for beetles on #7? ;)
(And from #1, there is an African species of wolf. From #2 and #8,
there are African sheep and, from #4 and #8, chats. Also -- from #2:
teals, seals, and hares; from #4: moths; from #5 larks; from #7, deer
and grebes. No doubt I've missed some -- especially the ones nobody
got...)

Also, there will, probably be a delegation of oryx, eland, springbok,
and kudu arriving soon on your doorstep to complain of the special
treatment given to the gazelles and impalas. The kob are especially
upset at having been disqualified on account of having a 3-letter name
(however, the bees from #7 aren't complaining about only having the
plural form available, not being big on individualism).

And the ostriches are just pretending the whole thing never happened.

[FlyingJoe]

Well, I'm truly impressed with your list, Plover! :-)

I did see some of those animals that were being guessed, such as
beetles, wolves, and so on. I didn't count those as their names
weren't particular to the african continent (I say continent, but
please give me some slack for the lemurs on Madagascar).

Had never heard of Chats. I can use as my excuse that a variety of
this bird can be found in India! (that was close...)

You're right though that I screwed up with Anteater. No excuse there.

Interestingly, my google searches for a list of African animals was
rather unproductive. So your search skills is way ahead of mine with
that list you provided. I wanted to stick with the better known
creatures, so I don't know how I missed Ostrich. I bet I could have
fit that in instead of using Anteater and so have a 100% correct
board. Darn!

Something that I find makes it hard for doing custom boards like this
is that although I am thoughtfully excluded from being able to play,
by the system, it prevents me from seeing the results as part of my
error-checking. So I couldn't see ahead of time if there might be
some other incidental animal in a board I had prepared, for example.

I should have gone with a minimum of 5-letter words since I had
pluralized 'Lions' after all. I couldn't fit a longer-named third
animal with Hippopotamus and Baboon, but perhaps some other
combination would have worked.

[plover]

Regarding five+ letter possibilities to fit with "hippopotamus" and
"baboon"... hmmm.

Sadly, gibbons are not African.

Hah: potto. That would work.

Alas, I just discovered, there are no alligators in Africa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator

I tried searching for "African mammals" and "African birds" on Google
and got sent to big lists on Wikipedia.

Other possibilities -- flamingo; and two of my favorites: pangolin and
fennec.