The book of antelopes, vol. 3 (of 4)Sclater, Philip Lutley
Science
The book of antelopes, vol. 3 (of 4)
Sclater, Philip Lutley
Antelopes
The next traveller in Somaliland to encounter this rare Antelope was,
we believe, Capt. P. Z. Cox, who, writing to Dr. Günther from Berbera
in April 1895, gave an account of the circumstances under which he
obtained a female example of the Beira for the British Museum:--
“I was returning from a short trip in the interior, upon duty
and pleasure combined--I was about 50 miles from Berbera;
the country I was travelling through was level plain, with
occasional flat-topped tablelands, with steep sides rising sheer
out of the general level of the surrounding country. I was
passing the foot of one of these large plateaux on 29th March,
with my Somali Shikari, in search of game, and remarked to him
that there was a rare Klipspringer said to be found on these
plateaux, and that I thought I would scale the steep side and
just see what there was at the top.
“Accordingly we toiled up the face of the tableland and reached
the top. It was simply a large stretch of perfectly flat ground
covered with large, loose, black, burnt-up stones, with an
occasional green bush to vary the monotony. The extent of the
plateau was about a mile in length by half a mile broad. We had
a very tiring tramp over this course, shingle from end to end
of it, and just as we reached the further end, where there was
a little fringe of green bushes, we espied several Antelope
browsing about 300 yards from us. I could not quite make out
what they were, and expected them to be some young animals of
the Greater Koodoo; but directly my Shikari saw them he said,
‘Do you know what those are, Sir? they are “Bahra”; I have only
seen them once before, and no sportsman has ever shot them.’
“There was no cover between us and them, and it was impossible
to stalk them from where we were, so we made a long detour below
the crest of the plateau expecting that we could come up within
shot on the other side of the animals; but it was impossible to
move without displacing stones and making a noise, and when we
emerged above the crest again it was only to see five Antelopes
streaming over the plateau in the direction we had just come
from. Under such circumstances Klipspringer would have separated
and taken to the rocks on the steep sides of the plateau,
whereas these animals kept in a herd together and galloped away
over the flat just as a herd of Gazelle would do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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