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african nature notes and reminiscences

by frederick courteney selous

Author: frederick courteney selous

Outdoors & Nature » Ecology

Added by: Michael L. Sh...

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Frederick C. Selous’s work, written at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, contains many of his most keen observations about life and wildlife in Africa. Fascinating not only as a period piece, Selous's thoughts are remarkably prescient about the state of game in Africa even today. Though it was written before the rise of the commercial poaching that has ravaged so much of the continent, the book gives an excellent insight into the need to carefully observe, record, and interpret the ecological signs found in the wild. Easy and lively in style, the tales told within encompass everything from dietary habits of hyena to the effects of sleeping sickness on agriculture.

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...interior of the continent. In the northern parts of Mashunaland and along the Central Zambesi and Chobi rivers the bushbucks live in forest and bush which is seldom very dense, and through most of which the sunlight plays constantly. In these districts the males are, when adult, beauti- fully striped and spotted, and the ground colour of their coats is rich red and dark brown, the females being of a dark rich red and also well striped and spotted. The situtunga antelopes live (on the Chobi and Central Zambesi) in immense beds of reeds which are always of one dull monotonous greyish green or brown. The adult animals are, as might be ex- pected by those who believe in the direct influence of environment, of a uniform light brown colour, except that the spots on the cheeks and the arrow- shaped mark across the nose, present in most tragelaphine antelopes, are still discernible. In the inyala antelope, which inhabits thick jungly tracts of bush along the south-east coast of Africa, the...