Female similar, but hornless.
Hab. West Africa north of the forest region (Senegal and Gambia).
The Reedbuck of West Africa was somewhat vaguely described by Buffon, in his ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ from a stuffed specimen in the cabinet of Adanson, which had been obtained from the island of Goree on the coast of Senegal. Fortunately Buffon added a tolerably recognizable figure of the “Nagor,” as he proposed to call it (from its fancied resemblance to the “Nanguer,” i. e. Gazella dama!), and taking this figure into consideration along with the locality, we can have little doubt as to its identity. In the first essay on the Antelopes, published in his ‘Miscellanea Zoologica,’ in 1766, Pallas suggested the name “Antilope reversa” for Buffon’s “Nagor”; but in his second essay on the same subject, issued in the ‘Spicilegia Zoologica’ in 1767, Pallas changed this name, which had been already used by Linnæus for another animal, to Antilope redunca. There can be no doubt, therefore, that redunca is the proper specific name of the present species of Cervicapra, although this term has been applied by various authors, as will be seen by reference to our lists of synonyms, to three other species of the genus.
Beyond quoting Buffon’s account of the “Nagor” and references to the authors who had adopted his description, little, if anything more, appears to have been added by subsequent writers to our knowledge of Cervicapra redunca until 1850, when the ‘Gleanings’ from the Knowsley Menagerie were published. In the letterpress to this work Gray appears to have confounded the present animal with C. bohor, and perhaps with C. fulvorufula, but the plate of Eleotragus reduncus (tab. xiii.) seems to represent a male and young one of the present species. In the letterpress we are told that a “young male” was then living at Knowsley, and, so far as we can understand the remarks, had been obtained from the Gambia, where Whitfield had given its native name as “Wonto.” Again, from 1850 to the present period there has been an almost complete blank in the history of the West-African Reedbuck. No examples of it appear to have been received either by the British Museum or at Leyden, and the species seems to have remained (even up to the present time) unrepresented in most of the great National Collections, except in Paris, where there are two mounted males from Senegal, besides other specimens formerly living in the Menagerie, and in the Senckenbergian Museum at Frankfort-on-the-Main, where, according to Rüppell’s list (Mus. Senck. iii. p. 182), there is also a specimen of it, which enabled him to realize the differences between this species and C. bohor.
It was not until 1890 that the Zoological Society of London received their first living specimen of this scarce Antelope. This was a young male brought home from the Gambia and presented to the Society, along with a young male Harnessed Antelope, by Dr. Percy Rendall, F.Z.S., on the 23rd of June of that year. A photograph presented by Dr. Rendall to Sclater, which was taken at Bathurst in August 1889, represents the Harnessed Antelope, at that time one year old, and the little Nagor, then only four months old, being fed together by Dr. Rendall himself. The Nagor, we need hardly say, has long ago attained its full stature, and at the time we write (January 1897) is, we are glad to say, still living and thriving in the Zoological Society’s Antelope-House.
It stands about 28 inches high at the shoulders, and is above of a nearly uniform reddish brown in colour, rather darker on the central line; the insides of the ears and the ocular region are white, the face being rather more rufous. The belly and inner sides of the limbs are whitish. The large naked space beneath the ear is white and very noticeable. The tail is short, broad, and bushy, like the back above, and white beneath. The horns are black; the distance from their base to their tips is about 5½ inches in a straight line; the muzzle is moist, naked, and black; and the hoofs are black.
Fig. 40.
Head of Cervicapra redunca. (In viv. Soc. Zool. Lond.)
So far as we know this is the only example of the Nagor that has reached Europe alive, except the specimens formerly in the Knowsley Menagerie and in the Jardin des Plantes of which we have already spoken.