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    Mountain Reedbuck: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective
    Mountain Reedbuck: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective
    Mountain Reedbuck: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Mountain Reedbuck: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective

    By L. R. Irby

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    About this ebook

    In 1969 I started a graduate study of mountain reedbuck in South Africa. One day earlier this year I looked at the calendar and realized 50 years had passed. I thought I might try to see how the conclusions I reached in my Ph.D. dissertation held up to the passage of time. Mountain reedbuck live in small groups on marginal lands in southern Africa, East Africa, and a small area in West Africa. The males have short horns so I figured they would not be attractive to trophy hunters. They occupy rugged terrain that is unsuitable for farming and not great for grazing so I figured agricultural interests wouldn't see them as competitors. They are relatively small (70 pounds or so),their meat is only moderately palatable, and they live in habitats that are difficult to hunt in so I thought few people would choose to pursue them for protein. All in all, I thought they had a better chance of surviving the modern world than most other African antelope species. I was wrong. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) placed them on the Red List as endangered in 2017. This book explores the reasons mountain reedbuck have not fared well in the 21st century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherL. R. Irby
    Release dateSep 29, 2019
    ISBN9780463802199
    Mountain Reedbuck: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective
    Author

    L. R. Irby

    L. R. Irby was on the faculty of the Fish and Wildlife Management Program at Montana State University for 26 years. Over the course of his career, he conducted research on the ecology of large mammals in the northwestern United States, Africa, and Central America. Since his retirement from MSU, he has much more time to devote to his avocations: writing, fishing, hunting, and traveling. Between trips, he and his wife live in southwestern Montana.

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      Book preview

      Mountain Reedbuck - L. R. Irby

      Mountain Reedbuck: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective

      by

      L. R. Irby

      *******

      Published by

      L. R. Irby at Smashwords

      Copyright 2019 L. R. Irby

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free e-book. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

      Disclaimer: This is a personal discourse on the biology of mountain reedbuck. In it, I have included numerous references from a wide variety of sources. I have attempted to give credit for ideas developed by other authors, but the conclusions presented in this book are my own. I have not intentionally distorted the views of other individuals, but for any mistakes in facts or attribution, I apologize.

      Dedication: To the field biologists who devote their careers to collecting basic data needed to understand and manage wild animals.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1 – Introduction

      Chapter 2 - Background

      Chapter 3 – Information Available in 1969

      Chapter 4 – Grand Design

      Chapter 5 - Behavior Patterns

      Chapter 6 - Social Organization

      Chapter 7 – Carcass Collections

      Chapter 8 - Captive Animals

      Chapter 9 - Habitat Use

      Chapter 10 - Census Attempts

      Chapter 11 - Limiting Factors

      Chapter 12 - New Information 1976-2019

      Chapter 13 - Status of Study Areas 2019

      Chapter 14 - Future Prospects

      Chapter 15 - Calling It a Day

      Literature Cited

      Chapter 1 - Introduction

      My first independent research experience began in 1969. I was a cocky graduate with a B.S. in Fish and Wildlife Management from Texas A&M University. I was also commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Field Artillery in May 1969. Because I was able to get a deferment from the army for graduate school, I was selected for an informal exchange program hatched out by Dr. Jim Teer, my undergraduate advisor, and Professor Waldo Meester, a faculty member at the University of Pretoria. I arrived in South Africa in July 1969 with two suitcases and more self-confidence than biological knowledge and was given basically free rein to describe the natural history of a small, inconspicuous antelope, the mountain reedbuck (Redunca fulvorufula). Not much was known about the species in 1969. I spent nearly three years in the field collecting data and most of five more years in graduate school trying to make sense of the data I collected. Altogether, this species consumed nearly eight years of my life, and I’m not sure I had a good handle on the critter when I finally finished my Ph.D. I published 10 or 12 scientific papers on the beast (see Irby in Literature Cited section), but in retrospect, they were only okay to fair-to-middling. None of them revolutionized biology. Now, after retiring from an academic career built largely on a search committee’s opinion of my early work on reedbuck, I have the time to try to objectively examine my conclusions and see how this species fared in the past half century.

      I will use my work as a jumping off point, but a large part of this book is dependent on information collected by other (and likely smarter) grad students and agency biologists in Africa. The world has definitely changed in the past fifty years. In 1969, manual searches of libraries at Texas A&M and the University of Pretoria yielded fewer than 100 articles relevant to mountain reedbuck. A half-second search on Google in 2019 yielded over 20,000 references on "Redunca fulvorufula." When I arrived in Pretoria, mountain reedbuck were regarded as a minor player in the world of African large mammals. They were small, had unimpressive horns, lived in small groups, and had a disjunct distribution associated with moderately specific habitats. No one considered them crucial to conservation in Africa, and no one was particularly worried about their survival. The situation has changed. In 2017, they were listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as endangered. The major threats were identified as habitat loss/degradation and hunting. Legal hunting is regulated, but illegal hunting has increased dramatically in the last 50 years. Mountain reedbuck are vulnerable to uncontrolled take because they are distributed unevenly in pockets of suitable habitat. Small localized populations of most species can be easily destroyed, and mountain reedbuck are slow to re-colonization lost ground. If the lost habitat is distant from extant populations, natural re-colonization may be virtually impossible in many areas given current human land uses.

      Throughout this book, I have used my own photographs where possible, rather than the much better photos posted on the Internet. When I did use images from other sources, I retrieved them from public sites (primarily Wikimedia – http//:commons.wikimedia.org/wiki) and have credited the photographers/organizations that produced them. All of the tables and graphs in the book were taken from data in my dissertation (Irby 1976). Conclusions based on my data and on papers by other biologists are my own. I tried to report information from sources beyond my dissertation as accurately as possible. For any errors, I will apologize in advance.

      Chapter 2 - Background

      Mountain reedbuck (Fig. 1) were first recognized as a distinct species in 1782 and were formally named "Redunca fulvorufula, Allamand 1815 in the early nineteenth century (Sclater 1900). They were placed in the Kingdom Animalia, the class Mammalia, the order Artiodactyla, sub-order Ruminantia, infraorder Pecora, and family Bovidae This system, still in use today, dates back to the eighteenth century (Linnaeus 1735) and reflects the inherent tendency of humans to try explaining things by putting them in boxes. In general, species with a few important common characteristics would be grouped in higher order categories (i.e. Animalia includes species that share characteristics such as multi-cellular bodies, membrane-bounded organelles, and flexible cell walls. This category includes organisms as different as jellyfish and elephants). Lower-order categories group organisms that share more and more characteristics. This system worked reasonably well during the 18th and 19th century for vertebrates. As scientific knowledge accumulated and technology improved, scientists realized that most of the important characteristics used to define groupings in the Linnaean system reflected the influence of genes inherited from common ancestors. Classification of invertebrates. plants, and the phyla containing simpler single and multi-cellular organisms does not lend itself to a system based on physical characteristics. This system does not work well at all for lower levels of classification of self-replicating entities that fall in the not-quite-life" category, such as viruses and prions.

      Figure 1. Southern mountain reedbuck ram and ewe in the Orhigstad Dam Nature Reserve, South Africa, 1970.

      In the Linnaean classification system, the mountain reedbuck has been placed in the Order Artiodactyla because they have limbs modified to enhance running, teeth specialized for clipping and grinding plants, and a digestive tract modified for extracting nutrients from plant material. Using the

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