418 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



carcass lying at the lower edge of one of the small glaciers 

 at an altitude of 14,500 feet has been reported by several 

 mountaineering expeditions on Mount Kenia. The skull 

 of a very large bull is in the National Museum, collected 

 by Doctor Mearns at the upper limits of the Kenia forest 

 at 10,000 feet. At the present time, however, the buffalo 

 is known to occur only in the lower edge of the Kenia 

 forest, and the two high mountain records, no doubt, repre- 

 sent strays which wandered far beyond their normal habitat 

 and perished. 



Nile Buffalo 

 Syncerus caffer aquinoctialis 



Native Names: Dinka, anyarr ; Aluru, johi ; Bari, makorr. 



Bubalus caffer cequinoctialis Blyth, 1866, Proc. Zool. Soc, p. 371, fig. 2. 



Range. — From Lake Kivu northward along the Nile 

 lowlands to the Bahr el Ghazal and Abyssinia; eastward as 

 far as Lake Rudolf and the Rift Valley of Abyssinia. 



The early explorers and naturalists who met with this 

 buffalo in Abyssinia and the upper Nile considered it iden- 

 tical with the South African, owing, no doubt, to its close 

 similarity in size and coloration. The decided horn differ- 

 ences were, however, detected in 1866 by Blyth, who named 

 the race from a specimen collected by Consul Petherick on 

 the White Nile. Von Heuglin, Schweinfurth, Baker, and 

 Emin have given full accounts of their experiences with the 

 buffalo of the upper Nile in the narrative of their journeys. 

 Lydekker has described, under the name of mathewsi, a 

 specimen of this race from the region lying between Lake 

 Kivu and the Edward Nyanza. This specimen marks the 

 extreme southern limits of the Nile buffalo. 



The Nile buffalo is distinguishable from the East African 

 by its more horizontally directed horns, which never curve 

 downward below the level of the floor of the skull. This 

 difference in amount of downward curvature is well shown 

 by the skull when placed on a level surface, in which position 

 it rests on the floor of the skull, the horns hanging free of 

 the surface, an inch or two above it. Skulls of the East 

 African race placed similarly rest upon the lower curve of 

 the horns, the floor of the skull being raised several inches 



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