It was not, therefore, until 1884 that good specimens of the Lesser Kudu were received in Europe, and a proper comparison could be made between it and the larger and better-known species. This was done by Sclater, and the results were stated in a communication made to the Zoological Society on February 5th of that year. Sclater’s materials were mainly a pair of animals which he had seen alive in the previous October in the menagerie of his friend the late Mons. J. M. Cornély, of Château Beaujardin, Tours. The young male of this pair, having died, was kindly sent to London by M. Cornély and formed the subject of a plate, drawn by Smit, which accompanies Sclater’s article on this animal in the Zoological Society’s ‘Proceedings.’ On the occasion of reading his paper, Sclater was likewise able to exhibit an adult head of the Lesser Kudu which had been sent home by Sir John Kirk, and a pair of horns of a rather younger male of the same animal, belonging to Mons. Cornély, which had been received by him through Mr. Hagenbeck, of Hamburg, from Somaliland, along with the living pair of animals just mentioned.
Fig. 115.
Horns of Lesser and Greater Kudus.
(P. Z. S. 1884, p. 47.)
By the kind favour of the Zoological Society we are enabled to reproduce here (fig. 115, p. 188) the comparative illustration of the horns of two species of Kudu which accompanies Sclater’s paper on this subject in the Society’s ‘Proceedings.’
Mr. E. Lort Phillips, F.Z.S., appears to have been one of the first English sportsmen who personally met with the Lesser Kudu in Somaliland and realized its difference from the Greater Kudu. This was in the winter of 1884–85, when Mr. Lort Phillips visited that country along with Messrs. James, Aylmer, and Thrupp. In his notes on the Antelopes obtained during this journey (see P. Z. S. 1885, p. 931), Mr. Lort Phillips informs us that the Lesser Kudu was met with on the northern slopes of the high plateau of Northern Somaliland, where it resorts to thick covert, and that it was not usually found far from water. Since that date most, if not all, of the numerous British shooting-parties in Somaliland have succeeded in obtaining heads of this beautiful species.
Capt. Swayne, our leading authority on the Antelopes of Somaliland, writes of the Lesser Kudu as follows:—
“This is, to my mind, quite the most beautiful of all the Somali Antelopes, and the skin is more brilliantly marked and the body more gracefully shaped than that of the Greater Koodoo.
“The Lesser Koodoo is found in thick jungles of the larger kind of thorn-tree, especially where there is an undergrowth of the hig or slender-pointed aloe, which is of a light green colour and grows from four to six feet high. This Antelope may also be found hiding in dense thickets of tamarisk in the river-beds. It is not met with in the open grass plains, and I have never seen one in the cedar-forests on the top of the Gólis. Its favourite haunts used to be along the foot of this range, and I do not think its numbers have been much diminished of late years. By far the best Lesser-Koodoo ground I have ever visited is the thick forest on the banks of the Webbe, near Imé and Karanleh. These Webbe specimens are different from those found under Gólis, as they are smaller, have shorter horns, are still more brilliantly marked, and have hoofs nearly twice as long. The hoofs of a Webbe Lesser Koodoo are, like those of a Webbe Bushbuck, of extraordinary length.