Size about as in the Steinbok or Grysbok; height at withers 20 inches in an adult male. General colour of neck and back a peculiar purplish grey, very finely grizzled with white, the extreme tips of the hairs being this latter colour. Scarcely a trace of a light lateral band, but a distinct dark one present, brownish, passing quite across the shoulder, and extending behind on to the sides of the rump. Belly not, as is usual, pure white throughout, but only white on the axillæ and groins, the remainder pale yellowish fawn, or even orange-fawn, this colour also extending on to the outer sides of the forearms and thighs; rest of limbs becoming darker fulvous to the hoofs. Head bright fulvous, quite different to the neck; area round eyes white, but no Gazelline facial streaks present. Tail short and rather bushy, coloured like the back, without darker tip.
Measurements of an old male skull:—Basal length 5·35 inches, greatest breadth 3·15, muzzle to orbit 3·2.
Horns ordinarily from 4 to 5 inches in length, the longest in the British Museum collection, one of Capt. Swayne’s, attaining 5½ inches.
Hab. Northern Somaliland; hills along the northern edge of the Haud.
On several occasions during the many years in which Sclater’s excellent correspondent Captain H. G. C. Swayne, R.E., was engaged on his various explorations and expeditions in Somaliland, he wrote about a “small red Antelope” found in the mountains which had the habits of a “Klipspringer,” but, according to native testimony, was of quite a different species. The existence of the same animal had also been recorded as long ago as 1885 under the name “Behra,” by Herr Josef Menges, in an account of his fourth journey in Somaliland, published in Petermann’s ‘Mittheilungen.’ Herr Menges met with the “Behra” on the Hekebo plateau (about 10° S. lat. and 44° 40´ E. long.), and had at one time a young living specimen of it in his possession.
After Herr Menges the “Behra” or “Beira,” as it is now usually called, after its Somali name, seems to have been first actually seen by Lieut. E. J. Swayne, of the Indian Staff Corps, Capt. Swayne’s brother, when he was in the Gadabursi country in the autumn of 1891. He observed two of them among very rugged hills, but failed to get a shot at them. He described them to Capt. Swayne as being “reddish Antelopes, rather larger than the Klipspringer, with small straight horns, which bounded away among the rocks in exactly the same manner as the Klipspringer.”
Capt. Swayne was much excited about this discovery, and promised Sclater to do all he could to procure specimens of the animal. On his last trip to Somaliland he was assured by his Somalis that he would find the “Beira” on Waggar Mountain, near the south-eastern extremity of the Golis range, but he had not time to go there. On leaving Berbera, however, Capt. Swayne exhorted his men to proceed to the mountains themselves and to endeavour to procure some specimens of the Beira, offering them a handsome reward for good heads and skulls of a male and female, and leaving instructions to his agents there to pay the men and to forward the specimens.
Early in 1894 the much-wished-for skins were obtained by the faithful Somalis and forwarded to Sclater by Captain Swayne. We were proceeding to describe and figure them in the Zoological Society’s ‘Proceedings,’ when we found that we had been anticipated by Herr Menges, who had just described the species in the ‘Zoologischer Anzeiger,’ and given it the name “Oreotragus megalotis.” It has, however, certainly but a very remote connection, except as regards its habits, with the Klipspringer (Oreotragus), and Dr. Noack was quite justified in proposing for it the new and appropriate term Dorcatragus (δορκας, an Antelope, and τραγος, a Goat), which he did in the same periodical shortly afterwards. Dr. Noack based his article upon two specimens, male and female, which he had then lately received from Herr Menges for examination.
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.