WATERBUCKS AND REEDBUCKS 491 



across the rump, completely encircling the tail; tail tuft and 

 legs not conspicuously darker brown than the body; body 

 size smaller, coat without reddish suffusion 



ellipsiprymnus 



The Defassa Waterbuck 

 Kobus defassa 



The defassa waterbuck is a singularly graceful buck with 

 elk-like carriage and a long, rough coat of hair. It is some- 

 what larger than the common waterbuck which it resembles 

 closely in color, differing, however, by lacking the white 

 elliptical stripe on the sides of the rump, and by its darker 

 legs and more reddish body color. The sexes are very sim- 

 ilar in size, the female being scarcely inferior to the male. 

 The newly born young are without the distinctive white 

 patch on the posterior surface of the thighs, the brown of 

 the sides extending on to the hinder surface and merging with 

 the whitish color of the inner surface. The legs are lighter 

 than the body, not darker as in the adults. The defassa 

 breaks up into a great number of geographical races which 

 are distinguishable by slight differences in tone of colora- 

 tion. The earliest described race is the defassa named by 

 the Abyssinian explorer Riippell in 1840. Riippell described 

 it under its native Abyssinian name of defassa. Another 

 name which is often applied to this group is that of sing-sing 

 used by the natives of Gambia for the West African race of 

 the defassa. The typical defassa was met with by Riip- 

 pell in the Abyssinian highlands near the shores of Lake 

 Tana. It is one of the brightest-colored races, and has a 

 large amount of reddish in its coloration. The defassa as a 

 species is wide-spread throughout West and Central Africa, 

 but nowhere does it reach the East Coast, its eastern limits 

 being marked by the great Rift Valley, which extends from 

 the Red Sea to Lake Nyasa. West of the Rift Valley the 

 defassa ranges from the Abyssinian highlands and the south- 

 ern edge of the Sahara Desert south to Angola and the Zam- 

 besi Valley as far west as Lake Nyasa. 



This stately, shaggy-coated creature is close kin to the 

 common waterbuck, differing chiefly in its white rump. 



