THE ORIBIS 
cannot be distinguished, it is always advisable to shoot the smaller animal, 
for if it is one of a full-grown pair it will prove to be the male, whilst 
even if it turns out to be the case that the pair consists of a female 
accompanied by her last year’s fawn, the latter will very likely be a young 
male. 
Oribis have a very wide, though curiously broken, range in Africa, and 
although they have been split up into many species or local races, there 
is extraordinarily little difference between the typical black-tailed oribi 
(Ourebia scoparia ), first met with in the Cape Colony, and the similarly 
black-tailed oribi of the Gambia ( Ourebia nigricaudata ), its most remote 
congener, geographically. The range of the Cape oribi has certainly not 
yet been satisfactorily determined. South of the Limpopo these little 
antelopes are found, in the eastern portions of the Cape Colony (I have 
myself met with them quite close to Port Elizabeth and near Graaff Reinet), 
in Natal, Zululand and the eastern portions of the Orange Free State, 
and on the high veld of the Eastern Transvaal. I never met with oribis 
anywhere in the western portions of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free 
State, or the Transvaal, nor in any part of Bechuanaland. Between the 
Limpopo and the Zambesi oribis are only found from the neighbourhood 
of Sena along the coast to the Buzi River, and in the interior in certain 
restricted areas on the northern slope of Mashonaland, in the neighbour- 
hood of Linyanti, on the north bank of the Chobe River, and in the valley 
of Gazuma, an open, boggy flat of only a few hundred acres in extent, 
which is situated about thirty miles to the south-west of the Victoria Falls. 
North of the Zambesi the oribi has a wide range in British Central Africa 
and in North-East and North-West Rhodesia. Now the oribi found in the 
neighbourhood of Sena and Shupanga, on the Lower Zambesi, is said to 
be distinct from the Cape oribi, and has been named by the German 
naturalist, Dr Peters, Ourebia hastata ; but as the range of the oribi 
extends from Sena all down the coast of East Africa, as far, at least, as 
the Buzi River, the oribis of the Pungwe district must be Peters’s oribis, 
and not Cape oribis, if Peters’s oribi is a true species. If this is the case, are 
the oribis of Northern Mashonaland, Gazuma Valley and the countries 
west of Lake Nyasa and immediately north of the Zambesi, Cape oribis or 
Peters’s oribis ? Allowing for small individual differences which may 
occur in any one locality, all the oribis I ever met with in South Africa, 
from the Cape Colony to far to the north of the Zambesi, appeared to me 
to be specifically identical. In East Africa a form of oribi is met with in 
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