Colours of Wildlife: Scimitar-Horned Oryx
Created | Updated May 1, 2016
Scimitar-Horned Oryx
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
The story of this beautiful animal, the Scimitar-horned Oryx, Oryx dammah, is a sad one. Once having inhabited an enormous range, today it is extinct in the wild! Only animals in zoos remain. At least in this, there is hope that the species can be multiplied and one day be reintroduced to its original wild haunts.
Semi-Desert Antelope
All the oryx species are adapted to dry regions. In South Africa, the local oryx is the Gemsbok, which lives mostly in the Kalahari and Namib deserts. The scimitar-horned oryx originally lived in the semi-arid regions both to the north and the south of the Sahara Desert. The desert itself is too dry for it. Oryxes are mainly grazers; the scimitar-horned oryx seeks out flushes of grass brought to growth by the very infrequent rains. Its decline is due to two factors. The first is that the Sahara Desert itself is spreading and becoming dryer. The desert is one of the youngest in the world, only several thousands of years old, prior to which the region was clothed in comparatively lush savannah grassland. There are still rock paintings in the middle of the Sahara showing animals like giraffes, rhinos and antelopes that today only live in the savannahs much further to the south. With the expansion of the Sahara Desert, the animals not adapted to living in its barren interior were pushed north- and southward to lusher lands.
The problem with this, for some animal species, was that those lands were already inhabited by humans and their flocks of cattle and goats. Aside from having to compete with domestic animals, large herbivores like oryxes were seen by the humans as sources of food. That is the second factor: direct hunting by humans. The scimitar-horned oryx has one great weakness. In the arid lands, oryx herds are often spread out over large areas, and some animals may lose touch with the others of their herd. To make themselves seen over large distances, they have the habit of walking up to the crest of a dune or a small hill, standing there silhouetted against the intense blue sky, so that other animals of their herds can clearly see them. But this of course makes them sitting ducks, metaphorically speaking, for human hunters with firearms.
So: aridification of the desert, competition with human livestock, and direct persecution, have eradicated this magnificent species from what used to be a vast range. Today there are small herds in zoos all over the world. These are being professionally managed to ensure good genetic diversity. One of the biggest problems for animals that are very rare, is that their genepool shrinks so much that there is not sufficient diversity, leading to a kind of 'in-breeding' even if sisters and brothers, parents and children, don't directly mate with each other. This lack of overall diversity makes such a species very susceptible to diseases, including inheritable genetic diseases. Also it makes a species less capable of tolerating and adapting to environmental and other stresses. As if it wasn't bad enough already with them having been hunted almost to disappearance and having lost their natural habitats! So, such rare animals that are in captivity need to be managed, making sure that the most genetically distinct individuals in the population get chances to mate so that no genes are lost. Then when the animals are released in the wild again, there is sufficient genetic diversity for them to adapt to the challenges they face (short of rifles and guns, against which no animal is resistant!) and to start diversifying. After all, in nature everything is constantly evolving. We don't just want a species to be saved, we also want it to be producing new species again into the future! In conservation we must never think we are trying to preserve a 'static' sort of situation, a frozen picture. The goal is for life all around the planet to be thriving, to not only maintain existing diversity, but to keep producing new diversity, new forms and new ways of life.
Back to the oryxes. The scimitar-horned oryx is one of the smaller species, reaching a bodyweight of 140 kg/about 300 lbs, and a shoulder height of 125 cm/about 4'. It is the only oryx with notably curved horns. Both the bulls and the cows have horns. It is very light in body colour, only the Arabian Oryx being lighter. Instead of the bold black markings of the other oryxes, it has light reddish-brown to cream markings, not contrasting much with its main coat colour. It coat is very short and it doesn't have a mane on its neck and shoulders like other oryxes do.
In the semi-arid fringes of the Sahara, there exists a surprising number of plant species capable of coping with the irregular rains. Scimitar-horned oryxes take advantage of these plants; thorny and scrubby trees and bushes give them shade to rest in during the hottest part of the day, and troughs between the dunes often concentrate rainwater which remains accessible to plant roots that penetrate deep into the sandy or rocky soil. Desert plants are able to survive very long without direct rains. The oryxes are adept at seeking out flushes of growth. Mainly grazers, they'll actually eat anything they can get: leaves of bushes and herbs, fruit and fallen pods. They don't need to drink water, extracting all they need from their plant food.
To find suitable food, oryxes wander over huge distances. They group into small herds of ten or so animals, but in places where lots of food is available, they may gather in groups of hundreds or even thousands. I mean they used to. Maybe they will again someday! But they are very capable of moving distances of hundreds of kilometres at a stretch, and living in herds allows animals that come across food to inform others of its presence.
In the desert, there is not a distinct rainy season; rains can fall at any time, though most of the time it doesn't. Oryxes breed whenever there are resources to support their calves. Birthing has two peaks, one in late winter and one in spring to early summer. The female will seek out seclusion, a tree or shrub or rock outcrop where she can hide, to give birth to her calf. The calf will take only a few hours to learn how to walk and will then accompany its mom and join the rest of the herd.
This species is wonderfully adapted to life in the drylands; with the Sahara becoming too dry for them, they can still survive if 'allowed' to spread to the regions to the north and south of it, especially the large semi-arid region known as the Sahel. All that is necessary is that the humans in these regions should welcome and make room for this magnificent species. One or two large (or VERY large) parks or reserves, in which they are not hunted, would serve them splendidly. At the time of writing, there's a project going aimed at re-introducing them to the country of Chad – I really hope it works.
