Saturday 13 August 2011

Feeling Horny

My maternal grandparents' house was an amazing place. As soon as you walked through their front door you were in a hall covered in brassware. There was a sideboard with a full set of willow pattern china, dark varnished oak cabinets, a large gong (!) and some armchairs. It served as a waiting room when my GP grandfather saw patients in his study. Above the sideboards and cabinets, on the walls, hung a load of stuffed animal heads. Honestly I can't remember whether it was my grandmother's father or my grandfather's father who acquired them. Both worked in parts of Africa, as a civil engineer and a veterinarian respectively. There were antelopes, gazelles, no doubt all manner of "boks", and a couple of buffalo horns.

My grandmother had a little black book of all the things they had, and which of their children or grandchildren was to have which items once they died. Grannie left me all their maps of Shropshire, the county they had made home, and in which I was born. She also offered me the pick of the animal heads. Most of the full heads were in need of a lot of work (missing eyes, ripped skin etc), and I couldn't have afforded to do this. So I chose the five mounted sets of horns.

Yesterday I finally got round to hanging them up in my lounge.


And you can see some of the maps too:


So what have I got? I know the two above the doors are African buffalo, Syncerus caffer:

  

I think this one is a Grant's gazelle, Nanger granti, as the horns are enormous:


But it's these two bothering me:

  

I'm not too great on mammal identification. With the help of Ultimate Ungulate I think I've narrowed them down to perhaps impala (Aepyceros melampus) or gerenuk (Litocranius walleri). You should be able to click through to larger images of them. Maybe one of my loyal readers is more clued-up on their bovids than I am and can help identify them from my crappy photographs...

7 comments:

  1. Those are totally awesome. I don't know what the little ones are though.

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  2. Thank you! I don't think they'd look as awesome if we didn't live in a converted Victorian almshouse though!

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  3. Thinking Springbok on the lower right. Gerenuk seems possible for the lower left, or Thompson's? Hard to say ... but Impala seem more recurved and with more widely spaced ribbing to me. Not sure about Grant's for the big set: have the horns been rotated? Seems like a strange shape. Rotate them 45 degrees and they start looking Reedbucky to me.

    Caveat: I am no bovid specialist by any stretch of the imagination, these are largely google informed guesses. I could well be wrong about all of them.

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  4. The very large set are odd. The small ones have the upper section of the skull intact, so it's easy to see which way round they're meant to be, but I think that the rostral end is up. I chatted to my mum about them on Saturday, and between us we wonder if they could be gemsbok (Oryx gazella). They're more curved than the gembsbok horns I've seen online though. They're very big - over 55cm, which I suppose would keep them within reedbuck limits, but it'd certainly have been a big boy my great-grandfather shot! Thanks for looking up all of these - I am sure your comparative anatomy is still better than mine, even if bovids aren't your speciality!

    A footnote to my post - Mum said it was my grandfather's father, who was in northern Africa and South Africa at various points some 100 years ago. I'm just investigating bits and pieces, but from the looks of things he was appointed government vet for the Orange Free State, and indulged in a little bacteriology while studying lamsiekte (he's the Keeling-Roberts mentioned). Oh if only the Annual Report of the Agricultural Department of the Orange Free State had been digitised...!

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  5. Very cool family history behind the horns! I agree that they seem too curved for gemsbok, and perhaps too big for reedbuck. Hippotragus was another thought I had, they are a bit stout for that, but perhaps a moderate sized-individual like this

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  6. Oh yes, that looks like a likely candidate. :)

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  7. Hi. your horns are: 2 set of black wildebeest (Connochaetes gnou) maybe a male and a female, the biggher looks a BIG bull. The big ringed horns looks as a set of waterbuck(Kobus ellipsiprymnus)without skull.these can maybe came from a roan antilope, if mounted in a strange way, but I'm more positive about Waterbuck. The 2 smaller are a dorcas gazelle (Gazella dorcas)and a springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis)
    :)
    Lorenzo

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