COMMON ZEBRA OR BONTE-QUAGGA 693 



met with zebra in the plateau region of the Boma country 

 at the head of the Kaia River, a tributary of the Sobat. 

 Some distance east of this region, in this extreme northeast 

 corner of their range, they meet the Abyssinian form of the 

 quagga, jollce, in the valley of the Omo River. 



Kilimanjaro Quagga Zebra 



Equus quagga bohmi 



Native Names: Swahili, punda milia; Duruma, /orrw. 



Equus bohmi Matschie, 1892, Sitz.-Ber. Nat. Freu., Berlin, p. 131. 



Range. — Lowlands of the coast drainage from three 

 thousand feet to sea-level, north in British East Africa as 

 far as the south bank of the Tana River, and inland to the 

 limits of the desert nyika zone; limits of range southward 

 in German East Africa unknown. 



The zebra is known to the Swahili as punda milia, or 

 striped donkey, and this name has been carried through the 

 length and breadth of East Africa by the Swahili porters. 

 The name is being constantly impressed on the minds of 

 sportsmen by the insistent porter, whose stomach is always 

 demanding zebra meat. Punda milia has thus become as 

 familiar a term for the zebra to the European traveller in 

 East Africa as quagga is to his cousins in South Africa. 

 The coast race of the quagga zebra was described by Mat- 

 schie in 1892 from a skin collected by Herr Kuhnert on the 

 Pangani River south of Kilimanjaro and partly from a 

 painting by Richard Bohm for whom the species was named. 

 The original skin is now in the Berlin Museum, where it 

 has been examined by Heller. It is a flat skin lacking the 

 head and the feet. Faint shadow stripes occur between 

 the broad stripes on the hind quarters but they are not 

 well marked. Undue emphasis has been placed on the 

 presence of shadow stripes in this race owing to their presence 

 in the type, but they are really a variable feature and are 

 of no racial significance. The type happens to be so marked, 

 but specimens from Kilimanjaro lack the shadow stripes 

 in at least fifty per cent of the individuals, and we have no 

 doubt that the actual occurrence of shadow stripes will be 

 found, upon the examination of a larger number of skins, to 

 be a very much less per cent. A mounted specimen from 



