African Nature Notes and Reminiscences. Frederick Courteney Selous
control, and then waiting till one or other of the unsuspecting animals feeds close up to them, when they rush upon and seize it before it has time to turn. If a lion, however, fails to make good his hold with one of his fore-paws over the muzzle of a buffalo or one of the heavier antelopes, and cannot fix his teeth in their throats or necks, they often manage to throw him off and escape.
It is perhaps worthy of remark that I have never known a case of one of the larger antelopes trying to escape observation by lying down. Gemsbucks, roan and sable antelopes, elands, koodoos, hartebeests, indeed all the large African antelopes, directly they see anything suspicious, face towards it, and stand looking at it, holding their heads high, and not in any way shielding their bodies and only exposing their faces to view, which, when marked with black and white, as in the case of the gemsbuck and roan antelope, are supposed, though quite erroneously, to render these animals invisible.
I am inclined to think, but it is only my personal opinion, that the difficulty of seeing wild animals in their natural surroundings has been greatly exaggerated by travellers who were not hunters, and whose eyesight therefore, although of normal strength, had not been trained by practice to see animals quickly in every kind of environment.
I am quite sure that to a South-African Bushman there is no such thing as protective coloration in nature. If an animal is behind a rock or a thick bush, he of course cannot see it, but his eyes are so well trained, he knows so exactly the appearance of every animal to be met with in the country in which he and his ancestors have spent their lives as hunters for countless ages, that he will not miss seeing any living thing that comes within his range of vision no matter what its surroundings may be. Bantu Kafirs are often called savages, and their quickness of sight extolled; but Kafirs are not real savages, and though there are good hunters amongst them, such men will form but a small percentage of any one tribe. To realise to what a pitch of perfection the human eyesight can be trained, not in seeing immense distances but in picking up an animal within a moderate range immediately it is physically possible to see it, it is necessary to hunt with real savages like the Masarwa Bushmen of South-Western Africa, who depend on their eyesight for a living.
Now, if carnivorous animals had throughout the ages depended on their eyesight for their daily food as the Bushmen have done, which is what naturalists who believe in the value of protective coloration to large mammals must imagine to be the case, surely their eyesight would have become so perfected that no colour or combination of colours could have concealed any of the animals on which they habitually preyed from their view. As a matter of fact, however, carnivorous animals hunt as a rule by scent and not by sight, and usually at night when herbivorous animals are moving about feeding or going to drink. At such a time it appears to me that the value of a coloration that assimilated perfectly with an animal's natural surroundings during the daytime would be very small as a protection from the attacks of carnivora which hunted by night and by scent.
Reverting again to the question of quickness of eyesight, I will say that, although a Boer or an English hunter can never hope to become as keen-sighted as a Bushman, his eyes will nevertheless improve so much in power after a few years spent in the constant pursuit of game, that the difficulty of distinguishing wild animals amongst their native haunts will be very much less than it was when he first commenced to hunt, or than it must always be to a traveller or sportsman who has not had a long experience of hunting.
However difficult an animal may be to see as long as it is lying down or standing motionless, as soon as it moves it becomes very apparent to the human eye; and, as I have had ample experience that any movement made by a man is very quickly noticed by a lion, leopard, hyæna, or wild dog, I am quite sure that all these carnivora, if lying watching for prey by daylight, would at once see any animal moving about feeding anywhere near them; and all herbivorous animals move about and feed early in the morning and late in the evening, the very times when carnivorous animals would be most likely to be looking for game by daylight.
During the heat of the day carnivorous animals are very seldom seen, as at that time they sleep, and most herbivorous animals do the same. But even when resting, wild animals are seldom motionless. Elephants and rhinoceroses are constantly moving their ears, whilst giraffes, elands, buffaloes, zebras, and other animals seldom stand for many seconds together without swishing their tails. All these movements at once attract the attention of the trained human eye, and I am very sure would be equally apparent to the sight of a lion or a leopard, were these animals to hunt by sight and during the daytime. But, speaking generally, they do not do so, though doubtless should antelopes or other animals unconsciously feed close up to where a lion happened to be lying resting and waiting for night before commencing active hunting, he would very likely make a rush and try and seize one of them if he could. Upon two occasions I have had my bullocks attacked in the middle of the day, once by a single lioness, and on the other occasion by a party of four lions, two lions and two lionesses. But how many old hunters have seen lions actually hunting in the full light of day? Personally, in all the long years I was hunting big game in Africa—years during which I must have walked or ridden many thousands of miles through country full of game, and where lions were often numerous—I only once saw one of these animals hunting by daylight. This lion was pursuing four koodoo cows on a cool cloudy winter's morning.
As a rule, lions do not commence to hunt before darkness has set in. They then seek their prey by scent, either smelling the animals directly or following their tracks. They understand as well as the most experienced human hunter the art of approaching game below the wind, when hunting singly; but when there are several lions hunting together, I believe that some of them will sometimes creep close up to a herd of game below the wind, whilst one or more of their number go round to the other side. The buffaloes, zebras, or antelopes at once get the scent of these latter, and run off right on to the lions lying waiting below the wind, which then get a good chance to seize and pull down one of the frightened animals. As lions have played this game with my cattle upon several occasions, I presume that they often act in the same way with wild animals.
No matter how dark the night may be, a lion has no difficulty in seizing an ox, a horse, or a donkey exactly in the right way, and I have no doubt that he does the same in the case of all the different kinds of game upon which he preys. Now that the buffaloes have been almost exterminated by the rinderpest in most parts of Africa, the zebra undoubtedly forms the favourite food of the lion. For every zebra that is killed by daylight probably at least a hundred are killed during the night, when, except by moonlight, they would appear to a lion very much the same, as far as coloration goes, as a black ox, a dark grey wildebeest, or a red hartebeest, all of which animals look black by night if they are near enough to be seen at all.
I have had innumerable opportunities of looking at wild zebras, and when met with on open ground they certainly have always appeared to me to be very conspicuous animals, except just at dawn and late in the evening, when they are not so easy to see as animals of some uniform dark colour, such as hartebeests.
In Southern Africa, between the Limpopo and the Zambesi rivers, Burchell's zebras used to be very plentiful in all the uninhabited parts of the country, and although they were often met with feeding or resting in districts covered with open forest or scattered bush, I found them always very partial to open ground, where they were as plainly visible as a troop of horses. In East Africa the local race of Burchell's zebra is remarkable for the whiteness of the ground colour of the body and the intense blackness of the superimposed stripes. These beautiful animals congregate in large herds on the bare open plains traversed by the Uganda Railway, and probably form the chief food of the lions living in that district.
When in East Africa a few years ago, I took special note of the appearance of zebras at different distances on the open plains between Lakes Nakuru and Elmenteita. I found that in the bright African sunlight I could see with the naked eye the black and white striping of their coats up to a distance which I estimated at about 400 yards. Beyond that distance they looked of a uniform dark colour when the sun was behind them, and almost white when the sun was shining on them. But at whatever distance they happened to be on the open plain between myself and the horizon, their forms showed up quite as distinctly as those of a herd of cattle or horses. Never in my life have I seen the sun shining on zebras in such a way as to cause them to become invisible or even in any