NEUMANN’S HARTEBEEST 
BUBALIS NEVMANNI 
T HIS species was first discovered by the late Mr A. H. Neumann 
near the north-east corner of Lake Rudolph, and appears to be 
a very local race, showing affinities to the Tora ( Bubalis tora). 
Mr Neumann assured me himself that it is entirely isolated in 
the district where he met with it, no other hartebeest of any kind 
being found in the surrounding country for a very long distance. 
These hartebeests were found by Mr Neumann “frequenting a tract of 
fairly open bush-country some little distance back from the lake-shore, 
where the ground rises gently in dry gravelly ridges covered with more 
or less scattered scrubby bush.” This appears to be all that is known 
regarding the habits of this little-known species, which is, however, in 
all probability very similar to those of all other hartebeests. Mr Neumann 
shot two specimens, a male and a female, of the species of hartebeest 
which has been named after him, and the mounted head of the latter, as 
well as a cast of the skull and horns of the former, are now in the collection 
of the British Museum of Natural History at South Kensington. 
Up till quite recently it was, I think, generally considered that the race 
of hartebeests frequenting the plains in the neighbourhood of Lake Nakuru 
in British East Africa was of the same species as that discovered by Mr 
Arthur Neumann near the north-eastern corner of Lake Rudolph; but the 
American zoologist, Professor E. Heller, after a comparison of the skulls 
of three hartebeests shot by Mr Kermit Roosevelt, near Lake Nakuru, 
with the type-specimen of Neumann’s hartebeest in the British Museum, 
came to the conclusion that the former represent a race or species distinct 
from the latter, and he has therefore named the Nakuru hartebeest 
“Bubalis nakuroe.” 
When I first visited Lake Nakuru in 1902, and again early in 1903, I 
found a species of hartebeest numerous there which I was told was 
Neumann’s, and which, indeed, has only recently been differentiated from 
that species. Of these hartebeests I shot and preserved seven specimens, 
five bulls and two cows. Of the five bulls three were fairly uniform in 
type, though they all differed to a certain extent one from another. But 
of the remaining two bulls, one appeared to me to be a hybrid between a 
Jackson’s hartebeest and the local race, whilst the other resembled Coke’s 
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