Key Takeaways
- The Small Five (also called the Little Five) are the elephant shrew, antlion, rhinoceros beetle, buffalo weaver and leopard tortoise — each one borrows a name from a member of the Big Five.
- They were named as a conservation teaching tool, to get guests looking at the ground and the small things, not only the big cats.
- You find them on foot. A guided walking safari, with a guide who knows where to look, beats a game drive every time for the small set.
- The malaria-free Eastern Cape reserves (Shamwari, Amakhala, Kwandwe, Addo) and the greater Kruger are the easiest places to put all five together.
- The leopard tortoise is the only one you are likely to see from a vehicle. The other four reward patience, a good guide and a slow morning.
There is a moment on most first safaris when a guest, three days in and a little drunk on lions and elephants, asks the guide what he most likes to find. Nine times out of ten the answer is something small. A ranger who has watched a thousand lion kills will still crouch over a patch of sand for ten minutes to show you the trap an antlion has dug. That is the spirit of the Small Five.
They are a set of five little animals, chosen because each shares a name with one of the famous Big Five. It started as a bit of camp-fire fun and a clever way for guides to teach, and it has grown into a quiet challenge that serious safari-goers chase for years. Seeing all five on a single trip is harder than seeing the Big Five, and far more satisfying, because every one of them asks you to stop, get out of the vehicle, and actually look.
We are a Cape Town safari house, and we walk guests through the bush most weeks of the year. This is our field guide to the whole set: each of the five in turn, then where to find them, when to go, and how to line up the full house on one trip.
What Are the Small Five? (And Why Guides Love Them)
The Small Five are the elephant shrew, the antlion, the rhinoceros beetle, the buffalo weaver and the leopard tortoise. Read the names again and the joke lands: elephant, (ant)lion, rhinoceros, buffalo, leopard. Five small creatures wearing the names of the five big ones.
Nobody is quite sure who coined the term, but it spread through southern African guiding in the 1990s as reserves started running walking safaris and wanted a way to keep guests interested in the things underfoot. Call something the "elephant shrew" and a guest who would have walked straight past a tiny insect-eater suddenly wants a photograph. It works. You will hear "Small Five" and "Little Five" used for exactly the same set — the names are interchangeable, and we use both here because guests ask for both.
What makes them worth chasing is that they teach you a different way of being in the bush. The Big Five are about scale and nerve. The Small Five are about attention. You learn to read the sand for tracks, to spot a stick nest the size of a car in a thorn tree, to notice the cone-shaped pits under a shady overhang. By the end of a week looking for them, most guests say the walking is the part of the trip they remember most.
1. The Elephant Shrew — The Standing-In for the Elephant
The elephant shrew is the one that catches people off guard. It is tiny, rarely more than 25 to 30 centimetres including the tail, with a long, flexible, trunk-like nose that it works constantly over the ground for ants, termites and beetles. The nose is where the name comes from, and here is the twist your guide will enjoy telling you: the elephant shrew really is a distant cousin of the elephant. It belongs to a group of African mammals called the Afrotheria, which also holds elephants, aardvarks and hyraxes. The common name turned out to be more accurate than the person who gave it ever knew.
There are about twenty species across Africa, from the small grey types in the Karoo scrub to the brilliant orange-faced giant sengis of the East African forests. On most South African reserves you are looking for the rock elephant shrew, which lives among boulders and kopjes, or the bushveld elephant shrew in the drier north. They are creatures of habit: each one keeps a network of little cleared trails through its patch and bolts along them at speed when alarmed, which is often the only way you know one is there — a brown blur and a rustle, gone.
How to find one: early morning or late afternoon, around rocky outcrops and the edges of thick cover. Sit still near a kopje where your guide has seen the trails, keep quiet, and wait. They are shy, fast and worth every minute of the wait.
2. The Antlion — The Standing-In for the Lion
The antlion is the one almost every guest ends up loving, because its hunting is so clever that you can watch the whole drama play out in the palm of a track. The name belongs to the larva, a squat, armoured grub with huge curved jaws. It digs a perfect conical pit in soft, dry sand — you find them under overhangs, below road cuttings, at the base of a tree where the rain never reaches — and then buries itself at the bottom with only the jaws showing.
When an ant wanders over the rim, the loose sand gives way. As the ant scrambles, the antlion flicks sand up to start little landslides, and the ant tumbles down into the waiting jaws. It is one of the great small hunts of the bush, and it is why the larva carries the lion's name. Ask your guide to tease one up: a thin blade of grass worked gently into the pit will often bring the jaws snapping to the surface. The adult antlion, which few people connect with the pit at all, looks like a large, weak-flying lacewing or damselfly and comes out mostly at dusk.
How to find one: the easiest of all five. Look for the cone-shaped pits in dry, sheltered sand almost anywhere — around camp, under a picnic tree, below a riverbank. Once you learn the shape you will see them everywhere.
3. The Rhinoceros Beetle — The Standing-In for the Rhino
The rhinoceros beetle earns its name honestly: the males carry a thick, curved horn on the head, and in the big African species a second one on the thorax, used for shoving rival males off a feeding spot or a female. They are heavy, glossy beetles, often a deep chestnut or black, and they are famous for raw strength. Weight for weight, a rhinoceros beetle is among the strongest animals on earth, able to shift many times its own body mass. If a rhino bull could do that, it would push over a truck.
They are mostly nocturnal, which is why the best sightings happen back at camp rather than out on a walk. On warm summer nights they come blundering in to the lights around the boma and the dining deck, and a good guide will pick one up and pass it round so you can feel the surprising weight and watch the legs grip. The larvae are fat, C-shaped grubs that live for months, sometimes years, in rotting wood and compost, quietly recycling dead timber back into the soil. They do no harm at all, whatever their size suggests.
How to find one: after dark in the warm months, roughly November to March. Check the lights around camp and the walls near the dining area. Cooler, dry winter nights are quiet, so time this one for summer.
4. The Buffalo Weaver — The Standing-In for the Buffalo
The buffalo weaver is the one you will almost certainly tick off without trying, because its nests are impossible to miss. Two species carry the name. The red-billed buffalo weaver is a scruffy black bird that builds enormous, untidy communal nests of thorny twigs, great dark masses wedged into the fork of a tree or, very often, piled against a windmill or a telephone pole. The white-headed buffalo weaver, common in the drier east and north, is the prettier of the two, with a clean white head and a flash of bright orange-red on the rump when it flies.
The name is said to come from the birds' habit of following buffalo and other big grazers, feeding on the insects the herds kick up as they move, much as oxpeckers and cattle egrets do. Their nests are small apartment blocks: several pairs living in one thorny pile, each with its own chamber, and the whole structure often shared with other species and defended as a group. Watch one for a while and you will see birds coming and going constantly, carrying twigs, squabbling, rebuilding. They are busy, social and full of character.
How to find one: genuinely easy, anywhere in the drier savanna of southern and East Africa. Look for the big messy thorn nests near open ground and the birds will be close by. This is usually the first of the five that guests get.
5. The Leopard Tortoise — The Standing-In for the Leopard
The leopard tortoise is the giant of the Small Five and, for many guests, the favourite. The name comes from the shell: a high, handsome dome marked in black and gold in a pattern that does look, honestly, like a leopard's rosettes, especially on a young one. It is the largest tortoise in southern Africa and the fourth-largest in the world, with big old animals reaching 40 to 50 centimetres and weighing as much as a small dog. A leopard tortoise that survives its first vulnerable years can live for 80 to 100 years, which means some of the ones you meet are older than the reserve itself.
It is also the one Small Five member you stand a real chance of seeing from the vehicle, usually plodding across a road after rain or grazing on new green grass. They are pure grazers and browsers, living on grasses, succulents and fallen fruit, and they take in extra calcium by gnawing old bones and even hyena droppings to build those heavy shells. Unlike most tortoises they cannot pull fully into the shell, so they rely on the sheer thickness of it for protection. After good summer rain you will often see several in a morning, and a big one crossing the track in the golden early light is one of the quiet pleasures of a bushveld drive.
How to find one: the summer rainy season, roughly November to April, especially the morning after a storm, when they come out to drink and feed on fresh grass. Warm, wet conditions bring them out; cold or very dry spells send them into cover.
Where and When to Find the Small Five
You can find members of the Small Five across most of sub-Saharan Africa, but putting the whole set together on one trip is a lot easier in some places than others. Two regions stand out, and both are ones we book all the time.
The malaria-free Eastern Cape. The private reserves around Port Elizabeth — Shamwari, Amakhala, Kwandwe, Lalibela — and the national Addo Elephant Park next door are, in our view, the single best place to chase the Small Five. They hold all five, they run proper guided walks, they are malaria-free (which matters enormously for families and older travellers), and they are an easy flight or a Garden Route drive from Cape Town. The rock elephant shrews live in the kopjes, the antlion pits line the sandy paths, the leopard tortoises are common after rain, and the walks are built for exactly this kind of close looking.
The greater Kruger. The private reserves along Kruger's western edge — the Sabi Sand, Timbavati, Klaserie, Thornybush — pair the Big Five with superb walking, and all five of the small set are there too. Summer, from November to March, is the window when the antlions, rhino beetles and tortoises are all active at once. You will trade a little of the Eastern Cape's convenience for the richest game-viewing on the continent.
As a rule of thumb, the warm, wet summer months bring the small things to life: the beetles fly to the lights, the tortoises come out to feed, the antlion pits are busy. Winter is drier and cooler and wonderful for the Big Five, but a slower season for the little ones. If the Small Five matter to you, plan for roughly November to April and build in time on foot.
How to Actually See Them: Get Out of the Vehicle
Here is the honest truth the glossy brochures skip: you will not tick off the Small Five from the back of a game-drive vehicle. The leopard tortoise, yes. The other four need you on foot, moving slowly, with a guide who knows the ground. That is the whole point of them, and it is why we push walking so hard with guests who want the full set.
- Book at least one reserve that offers guided walks. Not every lodge does. Tell us the Small Five are a goal and we will put you where the walking is genuinely good and the guides are keen.
- Walk early. The first two hours after sunrise are when the elephant shrews are active and the light is kind for photographs. Ask for a dedicated walk rather than a quick leg-stretch off the drive.
- Tell your guide the goal on night one. Rangers love this challenge. Once a guide knows you are after the small set, every walk, every drive and every evening around the lights becomes part of the hunt.
- Check the camp lights after dinner. The rhinoceros beetle is a camp animal in summer. Two minutes at the boma wall can save you a long search.
- Carry a close-focus lens or just your phone. Most of the five are small enough that a phone camera does them justice. You do not need a long lens for this part of the trip.
Do it properly and finding all five becomes the running story of your safari — the thing the group talks about at dinner, the reason someone is crouched in the sand at seven in the morning grinning like a child.
Small Five, Little Five, and the Marine Big Five
A quick word on the names, because guests ask. Small Five and Little Five mean the same thing — the five animals in this guide. You will see both in books and on reserve signboards, and neither is more correct than the other.
There is a third set worth knowing if your trip takes in the Cape coast: the Marine Big Five — the southern right whale, the great white shark, the Cape fur seal, the African penguin and the bottlenose dolphin, all seen on a boat trip out of Gansbaai or Hermanus. It is a different game entirely, out on the water rather than down in the sand, and it pairs beautifully with a Western Cape stay before you head to the bush. If your route runs through Cape Town, it is an easy half-day to add.
Plan Your Small Five Safari
The Small Five are the reward for travelling slowly, and they are one of the best reasons we know to build a walking safari into a trip. The easiest way to put the whole set together is a few nights in a malaria-free Eastern Cape reserve, where the walking is excellent and families and older travellers are comfortable, or in a private greater-Kruger reserve in the green summer months. We will match you to the right lodge, the right guides and the right season, and pair it with the Big Five so you come home having seen both.
Tell us you want the full set of ten — the Big Five on wheels and the Small Five on foot — and we will plan the whole thing around it.
👉 Request a Small Five walking-safari quote → or browse our malaria-free Eastern Cape safaris to see where the walking is best.
