WATERBUCKS AND REEDBUCKS 
491 
across the rump, completely encircling the tail; tail tuft and 
legs not conspicuously darker brown than the body; body 
size smaller, coat without reddish suffusion 
ellipsiprymnus 
The Defassa Waterbuck 
Kobus defassa 
The defassa waterbuck is a singularly graceful buck with 
elk-like carriage and a long, rough coat of hair. It is some¬ 
what larger than the common waterbuck which it resembles 
closely in color, differing, however, by lacking the white 
elliptical stripe on the sides of the rump, and by its darker 
legs and more reddish body color. The sexes are very sim¬ 
ilar in size, the female being scarcely inferior to the male. 
The newly born young are without the distinctive white 
patch on the posterior surface of the thighs, the brown of 
the sides extending on to the hinder surface and merging with 
the whitish color of the inner surface. The legs are lighter 
than the body, not darker as in the adults. The defassa 
breaks up into a great number of geographical races which 
are distinguishable by slight differences in tone of colora¬ 
tion. The earliest described race is the defassa named by 
the Abyssinian explorer Riippell in 1840. Ruppell described 
it under its native Abyssinian name of defassa. Another 
name which is often applied to this group is that of sing-sing 
used by the natives of Gambia for the West African race of 
the defassa. The typical defassa was met with by Rup¬ 
pell in the Abyssinian highlands near the shores of Lake 
Tana. It is one of the brightest-colored races, and has a 
large amount of reddish in its coloration. The defassa as a 
species is wide-spread throughout West and Central Africa, 
but nowhere does it reach the East Coast, its eastern limits 
being marked by the great Rift Valley, which extends from 
the Red Sea to Lake Nyasa. West of the Rift Valley the 
defassa ranges from the Abyssinian highlands and the south¬ 
ern edge of the Sahara Desert south to Angola and the Zam¬ 
besi Valley as far west as Lake Nyasa. 
This stately, shaggy-coated creature is close kin to the 
common waterbuck, differing chiefly in its white rump. 
