682 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



Guaso Nyiro. But the common zebra covers the range of 

 all these animals in East Africa. It is abundant in the 

 Sotik and on the Athi and Kapiti Plains, although inferior 

 in number to the Coke hartebeest, with which it there 

 associates together with the wildebeest and big and little 

 gazelles; but the causes, whatever they are, which so sharply 

 limit the range of the Coke hartebeest and wildebeest do 

 not affect the zebra, which is also plentiful along the North- 

 ern Guaso Nyiro in company with the oryx and the big 

 Grevy zebra. On the other hand, while the zebra's range 

 overlaps that of the big hartebeests, the latter extend far 

 to the westward of the regions in which the zebras are 

 found; we found no zebras in the brush-covered and fairly 

 well wooded and watered districts of Uganda in which 

 hartebeests were not uncommon, and we saw none along 

 the upper White Nile in regions in which hartebeests were 

 plentiful and which were seemingly in their essential char- 

 acteristics like the Sotik and the Athi, but they are known 

 to occur locally in these regions. Moreover, while the 

 hartebeests have become differentiated into sharply de- 

 fined and totally distinct species, the common zebra ex- 

 tends over a range which includes several of these harte- 

 beest species, without itself undergoing anything like the 

 same differentiation; in fact, the different varieties of the 

 common zebra grade into one another, from the southern 

 form with white legs to the more richly colored northern 

 form with fully striped legs. 



Where water is plentiful and the pasturage good a herd 

 of zebra will contentedly exist within an area of a dozen 

 miles square, or less. In the absence of hunters such a herd 

 normally leads an uneventful life, the placidity of which is 



