Brooke - Africa

Hopefully, as a hunter or nature-lover, you have been privileged to experience that magic moment when the tracker, with folded leaf, fills the forest with the compelling whine of a duiker call.

You are motionless, eyes only seeking the outline of a tiny blue or startlingly large yellow-backed duiker trotting to within range.

Whether you have hunted duiker only once or are a SCI Pygmy Antelope medal winner: You must own this book! It is the magnificent 12-year culmination of a mighty scientific mind, deeply sensitive to the bush, its people, and their methods of harvesting the 16 species of duikers (SCI counts 'about' 19, and Rowland Ward 22) for protein.

Viv Wilson’s storybook career started, unlikely enough, at African Explosives and Chemical Industries , followed by 10 years in the Game Department in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley; then as Curator of Mammals, and later as Director of the Bulawayo Museum in Zimbabwe. In 1973, Wilson and his wife, Paddy, founded the Chipangali Wildlife Organisation – a world-renowned animal rescue and rehabilitation, breeding, research and educational centre highly focused on duikers. The six paragraphs on the dustjacket listing his degrees, awards and experience make Wilson enormously qualified to write this 800-page, 4.1-kg book.

Wilson has compiled everything there is to know about these 'mini-antelope' (and their ecology) that occur across their 30-million square continent - from sea-level to Kilimanjaro, from the Kalahari desert to the Cameroon rainforest. On his own vast travels, he accompanied both ‘traditional’ (netting, snaring, calling, group hunting with dogs, hunting at night with shotguns) and safari hunters, gathered skulls in remote villages, undertook night counts, made forest transect counts, collected remains from crowned eagle nests and leopard scats, and even tracked down people’s pet duikers! “I measured a number of common duiker found in bushmeat markets in Brazzaville (Congo) and Accra (Ghana),” writes Wilson – an apt indication of the odyssey this book represents.

Each dive into this oeuvre reveals a fascinating fact: who first identified and named each species (called the 'bush-goat' in Sierra Leone, the yellow-backed duiker was ‘discovered’ by a Swedish botanist in 1794); how duikers’ preorbital glands indicate their sedentary territorialism; how their nasal panting helps conserve moisture, allowing smaller antelope to inhabit drier habitats; that the first American zoo to keep duikers (1896) was the Philadelphia Zoo, and it still does.

“Duikers may not be as grand as the Big Five or the spiral-horned antelopes, but they are among the most unique, interesting and difficult-to-obtain trophies in Africa. The taxonomy of this diverse group of small antelopes can be confusing, even to experienced wildlife biologists and PHs. There is no comparable reference work on duikers in existence,” writes Rod East, former Co-Chair of the IUCN Antelope Specialist Group.

O.K., you can skip the sections Abnormal Dentition, Presence of Broken or Damaged Horns in Males and Female Reproduction Organs. But do not miss: Where Found, Predators (which include baboon, black-backed jackal, wild dog, honey badger, spotted and brown hyena, serval, caracal, leopard, lion, cheetah, crocodile, pythons and raptors), Association with Other Species, Home Range and Territorial Behavior (including marking and aggression) – all of which are interesting and invaluable to educating hunters. And you might as well learn something about defecation and droppings.

Part Four – Hunters, Hunting Techniques and Bushmeat – is especially fascinating, and takes the reader from hunting with the Bushmen of the Kalahari to the Pygmies of south-western C.A.R. (where in 16 days local hunters took 125 blue duikers, 11 Peter’s duikers and 4 bay duikers.) Conclusion: blue duiker numbers are ‘satisfactory’ in 14 countries, ‘vulnerable’ in Nigeria, ‘rare’ in Malawi and ‘insufficiently known’ in Mozambique, Burundi and Rwanda. But in too many parts of Africa, duikers make up 70% to 80% of bushmeat meals, threatening their numbers even where habitat destruction is not (yet) an issue.

A mass of information is consolidated in over 100 charts, 150 figures and 100 maps, accompanied by 200 drawings and Paddy Wilson’s lovely full-page paintings of each species of duiker. If you considered your ‘common bush duiker’ one of SCI’s four ‘subspecies,’ read the detailed descriptions and defined distributions of Wilson’s 14 subspecies that he tops off with comparative photos!

Hunters – especially PHs - have an obligation to learn about the duikers they encounter, whether it is one they actively seek to collect, like yellow-backed and Peters’ duiker, or one they will probably never be blessed to see, like Abbott’s, Aders’ and Jentink’s duikers. One should be shocked by videos that show hunters shooting a duiker ‘without looking,’ then asking the PH, “Is it a male?” and the PH tossing it off to the staff for rations if it isn’t. Or the one with the Pygmy trackers carrying out three blue duikers from a single outing with a hunter. Both PH and clients should insist on evaluating the sex before shooting - even if it means half the beasties escaping first. There might be mistakes, but the truth is, even for yellow-backed duiker, there are no excuses.

The priceless Duikers of Africa is self-published by the Chipangali Wildlife Trust. The price is 990 rand plus 70 rand for postage and insurance; or US$170 plus $50 for postage with insurance (12 weeks) or $110 airmail (14 days). The limited, signed, slipped case edition costs 1500 rand or US$250.

P.S. Wilson’s Chipangali Wildlife Trust is seeking funds for fuel, additional radio collars and four camera traps, to better determine leopard, cheetah and brown hyena populations in Zimbabwe. “In Africa, we are constantly setting hunting quotas when, in fact, we often do not have a clue of what the populations of the large species really are.” To receive their e-mail newsletter and support their work, contact: duiker@ecoweb.co.zw

Common duiker - Lower Risk (least concern
Blue duiker - Lower Risk (least concern)
Maxwell’s duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Aders’ (Zanzibar) duiker - Critically Endangered
Bay duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Peters’ duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
White-bellied duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Ogilby’s duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Black-fronted duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Natal red duiker - Lower Risk (conservation dependent)
Black duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Red-flanked duiker - Lower Risk (conservation dependent)
Zebra duiker - Endangered Abbott’s duiker - Endangered
Yellow-backed duiker - Lower Risk (near threatened)
Jentink’s duiker - Endangered