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The Bongo is a large African antelope. Both males and females have “lyre-shaped” horns. (I love that description—lyre-shaped.) Their numbers are decreasing, and they’re threatened by the destruction of their forest habitat. One idea that might help bongos is the establishment of wildlife corridors that would let them safely travel from one national park to another. To learn more, visit the African Wildlife Foundation’s site.
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This particular hartebeest is a red hartebeest. Hartebeests live in Africa, and they are popular among hunters. Especially after they’re dead. Their coloring is quite lovely, as are their spiraling horns. Thanks to the hartebeest, I’ve discovered a new source for profiles of mammals: ESPN.com’s hunting section! It has illustrations, rather than the more standard photographs of dudes grinning over the carcass, thank goodness.
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0034Ramona requested a dik-dik drawing, and I believe Carlos did, too. Dik-diks are the world’s smallest antelopes. There are several species of them; this one was named for Sir John Kirk, a 19th-century British diplomat in Zanzibar. The dik-dik part of the name is an onomatopoetic word for the animal’s whistle of fear. Dik-diks, which top out at 12 or 13 pounds and live in arid African bush country, remind me of Italian greyhounds.
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0027I’ve started to worry that I will draw all the mammals that I know or that I find interesting or that other people like in the first couple years of my project, leaving me with more than a decade of obscure, never-photographed mammals and lots of rodents. I checked out a book from the library called Mammals—Their Latin Names Explained by A.F. Gotch, and I’m trying to “randomly” choose mammals I’ve never heard of to draw. The puku is one of those, as is the edible dormouse from a couple of days ago. (I put randomly in quotation marks because in fact, I’m choosing them based on their names.)
The puku is an antelope that lives in central southern Africa. The males, like this one, have these lovely ridged horns. The vardonii part of the puku’s Latin name is a tribute to Major Frank Vardon. A.F. Gotch tells us that Vardon was “an English elephant hunter, and a friend of Livingstone when in Africa about the year 1850; he wrote the first scientific paper on the Tsetse Fly.”
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