I was this many years old when I found out that a group of zebras is called a dazzle! How cool is that!
If ever there was an inspirational word for a group of animals, a dazzle of zebras would be it! A dazzling dazzle of zebras. Or maybe you would be more inspired to know about a flamboyant flamboyance of… oh sorry, no spoilers, you’ll have to read on to find out! But you can take a guess of what it might be!
When I was growing up, my dad loved to teach us with games, especially while our family of 6 was riding in the sedan, back in the days of bench seats and Sunday drives and families driving across the country once every other year to see grandparents. I‘m a new Grammy, and I can’t even imagine only seeing your grandchildren every two years. It was another time…and that’s another story.
When we weren’t fighting in the back seat or sleeping, we played twenty questions (usually Biblical), rainbow—finding the ROYGBIV colors in order on cars, buildings, or billboards (nature didn’t count. I mean, c’mon, green!), and alphabet—the hard version where we each had to find words that started with each of the letters of the alphabet, on billboards and buildings (license plates didn’t count and we pretty much all caught up to each other at X).
Once a teacher, always a teacher!
We did math in our heads as Daddy called out the numbers to add, subtract, multiply, or divide in sequence, such as 5+7-2×8+6/2-5… And no, we didn’t use PEMDAS. When I talk about this to my husband it drives him nuts that we didn’t use the order of calculations (I learned it as the order of operations). But seriously, how can you do that when you’re calculating in your head as you hear each number? I was just amazed that Daddy could keep the cumulative answer in his head as he called out the numbers while driving. As a footnote to that story, we once had a math bee in one of my classes and they did it exactly like Dad did. I did well. I may have even won—I don’t remember, but I remember being so excited that I had practiced this particular skill since almost before I was old enough to add. I’m the baby of the family, so I didn’t actually win when playing with my family. The older kids were always better than I was. And there was no “letting” someone win in my competitive family.
Looking back, I think we were pretty geeky (I saw that eyeroll!) Or maybe nerdy. I get the two confused—are they actually different? I remember on a trip from Nebraska to Yellowstone we kids each took turns adding up the digits on license plates of the cars we passed. What fascinates me to this day is that when we arrived, we were within 3 digits of each others’ totals. Statistics and probability anyone? Did I mention my Dad was a college math instructor? Maybe as a result of all that fun, I love math (don’t judge), and I was quite excited when we were at a restaurant (before Covid, of course) that had a chalkboard for the patrons to write on—and there were a couple of adolescent boys doing math on the board. Mathing is so cool!
But I digress. That rabbit trail went quite far afield! But now I am back to the dazzle of zebras. Mom taught us about flowers and cooking and taking care of each other, and Dad taught us (besides the Bible) math, history, and fun facts like what the groups of different animals, birds, and fish (you know this one: school) are called. I can’t list all of them anymore, but I remember a lot, as well as what the babies of each animal are called. Fun fact: elephants, camels, whales, hippos, rhinos, bison, and cows all have calves. Did Adam decide that when he named the animals, or did some genius along the way figure it out? How could you not be inspired by these cute little critters?
Some of the funky names that stuck with me were a “murder” of crows and a “congress” of baboons, a gaggle of geese and a pride of lions (ok, everyone knows that from Lion King). But today from a YouTuber who was at Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom I learned about the dazzle of zebras. And then he completely blew my mind when he called a group of those beautiful hot-pink birds that stand on one leg a flamboyance of flamingos. What?!!! I love it! I mean, could you find a more perfect name? I was intrigued enough to go looking for other unique and entertaining animal group names (Can you make up your own, like a chaos of kindergartners? A boggle of bloggers? I think those should be things!) Google very quickly found “A comprehensive list of animal group names” from Owlcation.com for me. (https://owlcation.com/stem/collective-names-for-groups-of-animals).
So you can thank me for finding these groups to look for next time you’re at the zoo: a shrewdness of apes (ever heard of Planet of the Apes? Hmmm…), a cauldron of bats (um, are they in an actual cauldron?), an obstinacy of buffalo (just how stubborn are they?), a coalition of cheetahs (they are the fastest land animals, you know. No idea what that has to do with a coalition but just thought I’d drop it there), a tower of giraffes (what else could it be?), a blessing of narwhals (come be blessed by the narwhals!), an embarrassment of pandas (really? Why?) or a bed of sloths (most apropos). As for me, I’m going to head straight for the zebras to be dazzled and then on to be awed by the flamboyance of flamingoes!
You realize I just researched those names to jog my memory and even cited it for you. My left brain is sneaking out again! Sigh…I’m still a geek (nerd?) If you’re inspired to follow my blog to see what other inspirational, geeky, dazzling, and flamboyant things I share and even get some freebies occasionally, just sign up below. It’s easy!
