408 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



open, grassy plains beloved of the zebra and hartebeest; 

 elsewhere they live in dense forests; elsewhere they wander 

 in the neighborhood of some river running through waterless 

 flats of grass or thorn-trees; they are found in the high 

 mountains, where the nights are very cold; and they are 

 also found in the low-lying, hot regions near the coast. 



In their daily habits bufl^aloes differ both according to the 

 nature of the country and according to whether they have 

 or have not been much hunted. In places where they live 

 in dense forest and are hunted, they venture into the open 

 only after nightfall; and where much molested they never 

 feed by day, so that observers have treated them as purely 

 nocturnal animals. But we are convinced that these ex- 

 clusively nocturnal habits are not natural to them. Doubt- 

 less they everywhere graze as freely, or almost as freely, in 

 moonlight as in sunlight; and probably the twenty-four 

 hours are often divided into periods of alternate feeding and 

 resting, without much regard to light or darkness. But in 

 many places they feed and rest out in the open during the 

 day, and in other places they spend the day in thorn jungle 

 so thin as to afford but scanty cover. 



We studied one herd on Heatley's farm, near the Nairobi 

 falls. The buffaloes must have numbered over a hundred, 

 and Heatley had carefully preserved them; he had killed 

 one or two bulls, and his Boer farmer had shot another in 

 his garden one night, but there had been so little molesta- 

 tion that the animals were living practically as if there were 

 no men in the country. Sometimes the whole number of 

 animals, or nearly the whole number, went in one big herd. 

 More often one or two small herds split off from the main 

 one, and there were also outlying bulls which went singly 



