East African oryx

Appearance

It has a grey coat with a white underside, separated from the grey by a stripe of black, with black stripes where the head attaches to the neck, along the nose, and from the eye to the mouth and on the forehead. The mane is small and chestnut-coloured. The ringed horns are thin and straight. The smaller Arabian oryx is overall whiter with largely dark legs.

The East African oryx stands between 0.79 and 1.25 m (2.6 and 4.1 ft) tall at the shoulder and typically weighs between 220 and 460 lb (100 and 209 kg).

Range and habitat

It has two subspecies: the common beisa oryx (East African oryx beisa) found in steppe and semidesert throughout the Horn of Africa Somalia and north of the Tana River, and the fringe-eared oryx (East African oryx callotis) south of the Tana River in southern Kenya Somalia and parts of Tanzania.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

East African oryx live in semidesert and steppes, where they eat grasses, leaves, fruit and buds. Some older males are solitary.

Radio tracking studies show the solitary males are often accompanied for brief periods by breeding-condition females, so it is probable they are executing a strategy to maximise their chances of reproduction.

In crisis

The species is listed as Endangered by the IUCN.

East African oryx is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on East African oryx, Wikidata item Q792143. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.