576 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



Masailand Klipspringer 



Oreotragus oreotragus schillingsi 



Native Name: Masai, engine. 



Oreotragus schillingsi Neumann, 1902, Sitz.-Ber. Ges. Nat. Freu., Berl., p. 172. 



Range. — From the Rift Valley in central German East 

 Africa northward to Lake Baringo and the southern slopes 

 of Mount Kenia, east to the southern shores of the Victoria 

 Nyanza, and west to the lower edge of the highland country, 

 at least as far as Kitui and Makindu. Altitudinal range 

 from three thousand to nine thousand feet. 



The Masailand klipspringer was named for Herr Schil- 

 lings, the pioneer flash-light photographer of Africa, who has 

 given us a vivid pictorial account in "With Flashlight and 

 Rifle" of his exploits with the game animals of the Kili- 

 manjaro district of German East Africa. He secured the 

 type specimens on the small hill of Ngaptuk, situated north- 

 west of Kilimanjaro and very close to the British East Africa 

 boundary. Jackson was the first sportsman to report the 

 klipspringer from British East Africa. In 1894, in "Big 

 Game Shooting," he devotes a few lines to it and states that 

 it is irregularly distributed upon rocky hills from the Taita 

 district to the Turkwell River. The klipspringer, however, 

 has been long known to inhabit South Africa and Abyssinia, 

 the two extreme points of its range. 



The Masailand klipspringer is at once distinguishable 

 from all other races by the presence of horns in the female. 

 This striking character was not known to the describer of 

 the race, Herr Neumann, who based his differences on slight 

 color discriminations. His material consisted of some un- 

 sexed skins with horned skulls which, he assumed, were all 

 males, owing to the presence of the horns. The females are 

 as well horned as the males; in fact, the longest-horned 

 specimen in the series of twelve in the National Museum 

 is that of a female shot by Kermit Roosevelt on the 

 western edge of the Loita Plains. None of the females 

 show rudimentary horns or any evidence of transition to 

 the hornless condition of the races inhabiting the country 

 north or south of them, nor do the females of such races 

 show any trace of horns, not even such slight evidence as 



