Imbabala
| Bushbuck | |
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| Male Tragelaphus sylvaticus, Zambia | |
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| Female Tragelaphus sylvaticus, South Africa | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | Bovidae |
| Subfamily: | Bovinae |
| Genus: | Tragelaphus |
| Species: | T. scriptus and T. sylvaticus |
| Binomial name | |
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Tragelaphus scriptus and Tragelaphus sylvaticus (Pallas, 1766), (Sparrman, 1780) |
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| Bushbuck range. | |
Bushbucks are the most widespread antelope in Sub-Saharan Africa. Two species are recognised, the kéwel (Tragelaphus scriptus) and the imbabala (Tragelaphus sylvaticus). Both species are more closely related to other members of the tragelaphine family than to each other (the imbabala to the bongo and the sitatunga, and the kéwel to the nyala). Bushbuck are found in rain forests, montane forests, forest-savanna mosaics, and bush savanna forest and woodland.
The kéwel is distributed from Senegal and southern Mauritania across the Sahel, east to Ethiopia and Eritrea and south to Angola and the southern DRC. The imbabala occurs from the Cape in South Africa to Angola and Zambia and up the eastern part of Africa to Ethiopia and Somalia. Both species occur sympatrically in northern Angola, southern DRC, around the Lake Albert area, southern Sudan and Ethiopia. Some game farmers in southern Africa discovered that the bushbuck may be excluded by the closely related, larger, nyala when they tried to introduce the two species to the same area. However, the two species are found in close proximity in natural antelope communities (e.g., in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique).
The kéwel is a smaller animal, with a mainly red or yellow ground colour. It is conspicuously striped and patterned and there is little to no sexual dimorphism with respect to ground colouration. As the first of the bushbuck to be described by Pallas in 1766 as Antilope scripta from Senegal, it retains the original species name for bushbuck. Its common name, Kéwel (Wronski and Moodley, 2009), is taken from the Wolof language spoken in Senegal. As most studies of bushbuck have focused on the imbabala, very little is known about the biology of the kéwel, except for what can be gleaned from museum specimens and hunting trophies.
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Wikipedia