-shaped mark on the nose; two or three white cheek-spots; edge of the upper lip and chin white, the white of the chin extending back on to the fore part of the inter-ramal area. From the middle of this area back to the hinder end of the throat extends a thickish mane of white and blackish-brown hairs; no white patches on the throat. There is also a dorsal mane passing from the occiput, backwards along the nape, over the withers and down the spine to the root of the tail; the mane brown on the neck and shoulders, white along the back. Sides of the body and hind-quarters marked with white stripes, which vary in number from about four in the northern forms to about nine or ten in the southern. Tail white below, black at the tip. Belly greyish, blacker in the middle. Fore legs of a rich fawn down the front, whitish at the base on inner side and behind the knee, also on the inner and posterior side of the cannon-bone, a pale blackish-brown patch above the knee on the inner side; fetlocks and pasterns also rich fawn, black behind; the white pastern-spots only just traceable. Hind leg coloured like the fore leg; inner side of the thigh at the base and anterior side down to the hock white, the white fading away between the hock and the pastern.
Horns with bold and open spiral curvature, measuring about 40 inches or more in a straight line, and an additional 12 inches or so round the curve; distance between the tips varying, irrespective of the length, from about 24 to nearly 40 inches. The skull of an adult gives the following measurements:—Basal length 15 inches, orbit to muzzle 9, greatest width 6·33.
Female. Generally similar to the male, but hornless and smaller and slighter; similarly marked with white, but the ground-colour of the body of a tolerably uniform fawn, becoming darker above.
Young redder in colour than the adult and strongly marked with white.
Hab. Africa south of the Zambesi, extending on the west into Angola, and on the east throughout East Africa up to Abyssinia, mostly in the higher districts.
We come now to one of the largest and finest of the whole long series of African Antelopes. In Mr. John Millais’s well-known ‘Breath from the Veldt,’ drawings of the heads of the Sable Antelope and the Kudu occupy a conspicuous position on the cover. Mr. Millais, than whom there can be no better judge, although he rather gives the palm to the Sable, admits that the Kudu surpasses its rival “in elegance and general appearance” when dead, but gives the Sable preference when seen alive on the veldt. It is really a difficult question, he allows, to decide between the “two rival beauties.” But we will proceed to the history of the Kudu.
Although the Kudu was certainly known to Kolben and other visitors to the Cape in early days, Buffon was the first writer to give us a good account of it. In the twelfth volume of his ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ published in 1764, Buffon introduced it into his work under the title of “Le Condoma,” and gave a figure of its unmistakable horns from a pair in the possession of the Marquis de Marigny. In these horns Buffon recognized the animal previously indicated by Kolben as a “kind of large Wild Goat.” In the sixth volume of the Supplement to the ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ published in 1782, Buffon entered into fuller particulars of the Kudu, which he now called the “Condoma ou Coësdoës,” apparently recognizing that the first of these names had been based on a mistake or misspelling. He was also now able to give a figure of the whole animal from a well-preserved skin received from “the interior of Africa.” Further information was added, taken from the Dutch edition of the ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ which had been then recently published by Schneider in Amsterdam, and to which Prof. Allamand had contributed a description of this animal, based on a specimen living in 1776 in the Menagerie of the Prince of Orange, to whom it had been sent by Joachim van Plattenberg, then Dutch Governor of the Cape. In his first essay on the genus Antilope, published in 1766, the great naturalist, Pallas, placed the Kudu sixteenth in his list, basing it mainly on the “Condoma” of Buffon, and proposed for it the specific name “strepsiceros.” Although, therefore, the Kudu could not have been the Strepsiceros of classical authors (which was in all probability the Addax), there can be no question that the Antilope strepsiceros of Pallas, as based on Buffon’s “Condoma,” is this species.
In 1827, Hamilton Smith, writing on the Mammals in Griffith’s ‘Animal Kingdom,’ used the term Strepsiceros as one of the subgeneric divisions of his genus Damalis, thus, according to the views of modern systematists, creating a new generic name, which has ever since been universally employed for the Kudu. Although many authorities are of opinion that the adoption of a specific name for the genus ought not to interfere with its usage for the species also, and consequently that the present animal ought to be called Strepsiceros strepsiceros, such has not been our custom in the present work, and it is consequently necessary to search out the second given specific name. For this there may be said to be two generally recognized claimants—first, “capensis,” bestowed upon it by Dr. Andrew Smith in 1834; and, secondly, “kudu,” applied to it by Gray in 1843. Of these we are inclined to adopt the former as first given, although the latter has been more generally accepted.
It is true no doubt that so long ago as 1816, in his ‘Lehrbuch der Zoologie,’ Oken introduced the Kudu into his list of the species of the genus “Cemas” under the heading “C. kuhdu, Strepsiceros, Cervus capensis.” But it does not seem to be quite certain that Oken hereby intended to bestow on the Kudu a new specific name, and under these circumstances it would be objectionable, we think, to call the Kudu, Strepsiceros kuhdu (Oken). It has therefore been decided to employ Andrew Smith’s name, concerning which there can be no doubt whatever, for the present Antelope, and to designate it Strepsiceros capensis.
The well-known travellers Sparrman (1785), Thunberg (1795), Daniell (1804), Burchell (1822), and Steedman (1835), all met with the Kudu during their journeyings in different parts of the Cape Colony, in the more remote parts of which it was still plentiful in their days. Harris (1836–37) states that although at that period the Kudu was still found in many of the more retired portions of the Colony, he did not himself meet with it until he had entered the “prolific environs” of the Cashaan Mountains of Pretoria. Harris claims for the Kudu the “right and title to the sovereignty of all the Antelopes.” Other species of this group, he allows, may be “stately, elegant, or curious,” but the Kudu is “absolutely regal.”