300 Great and Small Game of Africa 



or in which large shallow lagoons are constantly present, as the result of 

 the annual overflow from the river. It is therefore, or perhaps I ought to 

 say was, particularly plentiful in the open grassy plains, which are always 

 more or less inundated hy the overflow from the Tamalakan, Mababi, 

 Machabi, Sunta, and Chobi or Quando Rivers. In the Barotsi valley, on the 

 Upper Zambesi, it used to be very abundant, as also along the swampy 

 rivers flowing into the Upper Zambesi from the east, such as the Majili 

 and the Lumbi ; but along the course of the Zambesi itself to the south of 

 the Barotsi valley it is nowhere found except in the flat swampy ground 

 between Sesheke and the mouth of the Chobi. In 1878 I met with large 

 herds of lechwe antelopes in the swamps of the Lukanga River, a tributary 

 of the Kafukwe, about 1 50 miles south-west of Lake Bengweolo, and as it 

 has also been described as abundant in the neighbourhood of that lake as 

 well as on the shores of Lake Mweru, this species must have a more 

 extended range beyond the Zambesi than it has to the south of that river. 

 In 1879 I met with the lechwe antelope amongst some lagoons on the 

 lower Botletlie River not far from Lake Komadau, where Dr. Livingstone 

 probably originally discovered this species in 1849. Personally I have 

 never met with lechwe except in flooded ground, or the immediate vicinity 

 of such ground, and if we except the situtunga {Jragclaphus spekei), there 

 is no other species of antelope to be found in Southern or South Central 

 Africa that so well merits the name of water antelope as the lechwe. 1 The 

 waterbuck, pookoo, and reedbuck live and feed on the banks of rivers and 



1 Mr. H. A. Bryden, who visited the Botletlie River in 1890, met with lechwe antelopes at a distance 

 of a mile and a half from water. Farther north I have never-seen these antelopes at anything like that 

 distance from water, and as the lower Botletlie is the extreme southern limit of the lechwe's range, it is 

 possible that the habits of this species have there become slight!] modified in the struggle for existence, 

 and that necessity compels them to go a considerable distance from water in order to obtain a sufficiency 

 of food. The fact that in the lechwe the backs of both the fore and hind pasterns are quite naked, as 

 in the situtunga, shows that this species has been long accustomed to stand in wet ground, and where it 

 is really at home, as in the flooded meadow-lands of the Chobi, the Upper Zambesi, and the Lukanga 

 Rivers, it is nearly always met with actually standing and feeding in shallow water. 



See my note as to lechwe on p. 297. — Ed. 



