Remembering Giraffes: the latest book in the photo conservation series that has already raised over US$1.6 million is now on sale

We've published ten books so far, and Remembering Giraffes will be our eleventh when it is published on October 12, 2026, ten years after Remembering Elephants started it all.

The idea has always been to bring together beautiful wildlife photography, raise awareness of the threats facing the animals and use all profits from book sales to help protect them.

More than 62,000 books have been sold worldwide, and we've donated over US$1.69/£1.28 million to 86 conservation projects in 36 countries.

So far, 316 photographers have donated images to the series. When I started, I thought raising US$132,000/£100,000 would be an ambitious target, so to have reached this point is beyond anything I imagined.

I'm thrilled that Stephanie Fennessy, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, and award-winning wildlife photographer Marcus Westberg will be joining me at the Royal Geographical Society in London on Wednesday, October 14, our 11th launch there.

Stephanie will bring her experience of giraffe conservation across Africa, while Marcus will share his perspective as a photographer whose work explores African ecosystems and conservation stories.

He is a regular contributor to Remembering Wildlife (and a little magazine you might have heard of called National Geographic, too), and his images in this book include the rarely photographed Sudd wetlands in South Sudan.

There will be a slideshow of images from Remembering Giraffes, books and the new candles available to buy and an opportunity for guests attending in person to have their books signed by some of the contributing photographers.

Online guests will also see a screening of a movie called 'The Woman Who Loved Giraffes' about Anne Innes Dagg, the first western researcher to study giraffes and to whom the book is dedicated.

This year, VIP ticket holders, both in person and online, will also be treated to a virtual afternoon game drive on November 11, 2026 at Chitwa Chitwa, led by contributing photographer Tristan Dicks.

The broadcast has been donated by the WildEarth Impact Foundation. It's a lovely way to take the celebration beyond the launch evening and bring people into the world these books are helping to protect.

For anyone who loves wildlife, conservation and safaris, the launch is an annual must!

Click here to find out more about the event, and buy tickets.

People see giraffes on safari and assume they must be fine. But seeing plenty in one protected area can hide what is happening elsewhere, where populations are much smaller and more isolated.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are major problems. Agriculture, roads, fences and expanding settlements divide the landscapes giraffes need to move through and feed in.

In some regions they are also hunted for bushmeat, while conflict and political instability make protecting them extraordinarily difficult.

That's why their decline has been described as a 'silent extinction': it has happened with far less public attention than the losses of some other iconic animals.

There is encouraging news, though. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation’s (GCF) 2025 report shows positive population trends in three of the four species, reflecting conservation progress as well as a better understanding of their numbers.

That gives us hope, but it certainly doesn’t mean the threats have gone away.

There's simply nothing else quite like them. Even as a silhouette on the horizon, a giraffe is unmistakable.

That extraordinary height, the long neck and those beautiful patterns make them one of the animals people immediately associate with Africa.

But I think familiarity can work against them. People sometimes drive straight past giraffes on safari because they are looking for something else.

If you stop and really watch, you notice the eyelashes, the way they move and the tenderness between a mother and her calf. I hope this book encourages people to give them that attention.

The cover photograph is by Kenyan photographer Gurcharan Roopra and shows a mother and calf at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. They are Nubian giraffes, a subspecies of the northern giraffe.

What I love about it is the tenderness. It invites you to think about them as a mother and baby, with a relationship you can connect to.

That emotional connection is such an important part of what we hope the books will achieve.

As soon as I saw this image, I knew it was something special but as people who know the series will realise, it doesn’t follow our usual portrait against a dark background.

So at first that's what I was looking for. But when this one came across my desk and we played with it to see how it would look, I knew we had a winner and I justified that as we move into a second decade, we can also broaden the look of the covers.

For years, giraffes were generally treated as one species, but research has shown that there are four distinct species: northern, southern, Masai and reticulated giraffes.

In August 2025, the IUCN's Giraffe and Okapi Specialist Group formally recognised that classification following a review of the evidence.

This matters because grouping all giraffes together can conceal how precarious the situation is for some of them.

GCF's 2025 estimate puts northern giraffes at only around 7,000 in the wild, whereas southern giraffes are much more numerous. Their circumstances and conservation needs are different.

It also makes looking at giraffes more interesting. The differences go beyond their coat patterns, but those patterns are a lovely starting point for noticing that the giraffe you see in one part of Africa may be a different species from one you’ve seen elsewhere.

Contributors include Wim den Heever (the current reigning Wildlife Photographer of the Year), Art Wolfe, Marsel van Oosten, Jonathan and Angela Scott, Michael Poliza, Andy Rouse, Federico Veronesi and Marcus Westberg, among many others. All have generously donated their images to help raise money for conservation.

We also have 20 images selected through our photography competition. I love that the book brings together established names and photographers whose work readers may be discovering for the first time.

Marcus Westberg's photographs from the Sudd wetlands in South Sudan show giraffes in a landscape that many people would never associate with them.

Those images help broaden our idea of where giraffes live and what their world looks like. And Wim den Heever's image taken from a waterhole hide at night is a masterclass in lighting and technique. 

Among the competition images, M S Ranganathan's image captures reticulated giraffes with sunlight catching the dust around them, while Nili Gudhka’s photo shows a Masai giraffe standing over her calf beneath gathering storm clouds. They are very different images, but both make you stop and look.

I'm also particularly attached to my own photograph on the back cover. We spent three or four hours watching a mother and her young calf, and the image catches the baby looking up towards its mother's belly.

The difference in size is extraordinary. It brings back a wonderful memory of slowing down and simply watching them together.