Hey I might be doing some gigs this summer at day camps and day care centers, hoping for some zoo shows too. I am thinking about making a giraffe puppet. I'm thinking just the neck and head and he could peek out over my theater and interact with people. Any ideas on a good mechanism to use?

Your hand.  Keep it simple.  We used to do shows that where marketed to zoo's and one of them had a giraffe puppet like you describe. He was simply a hand puppet with and extra long neck on him.  Means the neck comes down to around the elbow or below.

Now let's say your theater is extra tall and you can't really get your hand up that high (I am 6'3" so forget not every has my reach). You could look at that toy store or hardware store for one of those grabbers. In the toy store they normally have a head on them of some animal but in the hardware story they are just the claw on the one end with the trigger at the other. Sometimes medical supply sells them also for folks can't reach down to get on socks.  You could re-work this to be inside your puppets head so you could extend it up above yours. Only thing is your puppet is not going to be as expressive since all it can do is open and close it's mouth. You don't get any articulation in the neck and head itself this way.

There is also this make it yourself variation on the above you could use.  If you have not already make sure and check out the rest of Philips videos over at YT. Pretty sure there may be a couple others that would be useful to you in this project.

If you had a well placed "bush" with leaves that stuck above a fence at the side of your stage, your head could be inside the bush so that more of your arm could be inside the neck of giraffe. If you had a green shade head piece on you could see thru the leaves to interact live with audience.  The bush could even wrap around the sides of your head some, remember that from different angles that your audience might see more of the side of bush.  Giraffe could pretend to eat the leaves until someone gets his attention. I would make the eyes extra large and shiny black with big eyelashes to make it more expressive. Their lower jaw seems to move side to side more like a Lama chews rather than just up and down so if you had a looser mouth hinge you might be able to do that chew. Joan Fabric has some awesome giraffe fake fur that went on sale around Halloween. I got some fabric but have not had time to get my puppet made yet.

Thanks. Yeah I saw that fabric, it's what got me thinking