Bongo (Photo by Jessie Cohen)

Margie Gibson - NZP Staff Writer

Entering the Zoo through the Connecticut Avenue pedestrian gate, visitors quickly leave behind the brash noises and sights of the street. They're greeted with bird songs, lush, green-carpeted animal enclosures, towering trees, and splashes of color from the season's flowers. A few steps farther into the Zoo, visitors find the grassy, steeply sloped enclosure, home of a small herd of bongo-strikingly-patterned, chestnut brown and white striped members of the antelope family.

Bongos' striped coats provide camouflage in the forested habitat of their native range, which stretches discontinuously from Sierra Leone in West Africa to Kenya on the continent's east coast. There, when sunlight filters through trees and creates a dappled effect on the forest floor, the animals disappear into the landscape. At the Zoo, the bongos often congregate in the shady, bare areas near the fences, just feet from the walkway. Visitors get a good sense of how well the animals blend in-it's easy to overlook these large animals even though they are virtually within arm's reach.

Bongos, whose Greek-derived name, Tragelaphus euryceros, means "goat deer with wide-spreading horns," have short hair and manes that run from their necks all the way down their backs. Their sides are marked by 11 to 12 creamy stripes, although they rarely have an equal number of stripes on each side. The white chevron on their foreheads, large ears touched at the tips with tinges of cream, and white markings on their legs suggest that they are visually oriented. Their large ears probably indicate a very acute sense of hearing.

Perhaps due to their size (males weigh about 650 pounds and females weigh about 530 pounds), they are less agile than other species of antelopes. Their body shape is typical of an animal that spends its time searching for food in densely wooded areas. Its convex back with high point in the lumbar region allows it to move with its nose close to the ground and horns tilted over its back. This wedge-like shape enables the bongo to move through thick tangles of vines and brambles that are virtually impassable by humans. It is rarely known to jump over an obstacle higher than three feet. Rather, it prefers to slip beneath them, and needs only about two and a half feet of clearance.

Males tend to be darker in color than females and their coats continue to deepen in color as they age. In contrast to most other members of the genus Tragelaphus in which only males have horns, both sexes of bongos possess twisted, backswept horns. Bongos are active primarily at night. During the day, they conceal themselves in the forests, alert and ready to flee if any strange sound or scent signals danger. The dense brambles, vines, lianas and giant nettle bushes that that blanket the floor of their mountain habitat almost always ensure that the bongo hears any intruder-human or animal-crashing through the undergrowth long before he approaches too closely.

Bongos are browsers and eat tips, shoots, and trailers of plants. They use their horns to uproot tender-rooted saplings, a bongo delicacy. They are also especially fond of bamboo leaves, rotten bark and decayed trees that soften and decompose on the forest foor. They have also been observed eating the charcoal of burned trees, probably for the salt content.

The Zoo's current herd of one male and two females increased on 25 April 1992 with the birth of a female calf named Etari. She looked much like the adults except for her diminutive size, lighter coat color, tail, and lack of horns, which appear when the calf is about four months old. As the calf matured, her flat, black-tipped tail with touches of white became more similar in appearance to the adult bongos' bovine-like, tufted tail.

The newborn, although otherwise healthy, had an angular limb deformity in both front legs. This problem, which is also fairly common in horses, resullts from abnormalities in growth during the fetal stage. During that period, the growth plates in the long bones of the calf's legs grow faster on one side than the other. Left untreated, this condition can eventually result in leg curvature.

Zoo veterinarian Scott Citino described the corrective procedure used on the bongo calf. "After x-raying and measuring the angulation of the legs, we made an incision in the side of the leg where growth was the slowest. At the bone, just above the growth plate, we made a t-shaped incision in the periosteum, a fibrous covering over the bone. This procedure releases the periosteum and allows the bone to grow faster at that point." In addition to repeating this procedure for the other leg, Zoo veterinarians also removed a small portion of the ulna from the bone in the foreleg.

For each treatment, the calf was separated from its mother for less than three hours. Now it appears that both legs are growing normally and no further corrective surgery is needed.

* * *

The history of bongos both at the National Zoo and outside of its African range is relatively short. Until recent decades, the striking but elusive bongo remained a true curiosity for Westerners. In the mid-19th century bongos were unknown outside Africa until Paul du Chaillu, a French explorer of Central Africa, brought the first skin back to Europe. The species has lived here at the Zoo only 22 years, although in the 1930's a close relative, the nyala, was one of the prized animals in the Zoo's collection.

The animal is cloaked in mystery even among some of the local tribes in Africa. Bongo were taboo among the Zande, who believed that eating the meat or even touching the striped, red animals caused leprosy. While the taboo certainly must have helped to maintain a good-sized bongo population in the Zande region, neighboring peoples profited from the Zande's taboo. When bongos fell into from pit traps intended for other animals, members of neighboring tribes had no fear about removing the bongo, cutting and drying the meat, and selling it in distant markets.

Before the 1940's only two zoos in the world, the New York Zoological Garden and the Rome Zoo, exhibited bongos. The New York Zoological Garden acquired their bongo, Doreen, after it was learned that a British big-game hunter, Col. Percy-Smith, was planning an expedition to East Africa. He was asked to capture a living bongo for the Bronx Zoo, which he did successfully. The animal, a calf when caught, had to be weaned on a cow and underwent an epic journey through Mombasa, Kenya, and London back to New York. As recently as 1970, a total of only 12 bongos had been exhibited in zoos, and they were always housed singly, never in pairs or larger groups.

The placid demeanor of the bongo gives no hint of the excitement that reigned when these bovids first arrived at the National Zoo. In October, 1970, the local public and media greeted their acquisition with much acclaim, but the story of how they got here began several years before they arrived with Theodore Reed, director of the Zoo from 1957 to 1983.

In an effort to obtain bongos for the Zoo, Reed, supported by the National Geographic Society, undertook several expeditions to Africa. In October, 1968, Reed hiked through the bamboo forests in heavy rains at elevations from 7,000 to 10,000 feet in Kenya's Abedare Mountains, which are situated halfway between the Great Rift Valley and the Mt. Kenya massif. Although he and a National Geographic photographer found bongo trails, which were also used by elephants and Cape buffalo, the reddish antelope with the twisted horns eluded them. Not until several expeditions later were they able to obtain four animals. On 26 October 1970, four bongos arrived in Washington. The original herd included two males, Thugi and Kigai from the Abedare Mountains, a female, Kanitia, also from the Abedare region, and a second female, L'Ehania, from Ivory Coast. Their journey to North America, begun in their native forests, led to two months quarantine in Mombasa; 26 days at sea; then another 30 day quarantine in New Jersey before finally ending in Washington, D.C.

Great fanfare heralded their arrival. Television cameras rolled as the animals were uncrated. Much to the surprise of everyone present, Thugi and Kanitia began breeding within a half hour of their arrival. Not only was the breeding documented on film, but it also established the gestation period for the species when Kanitia gave birth to a female calf nine months later.

Although Thugi had died in the interval between mating and birth, his genes were carried on to another generation and helped set in motion a decade-long study of bongos that greatly enriched the scientific understanding of this species. And, although bongos are still not among the most common animals exhibited, there are about 200 living in zoos worldwide. While that's only one-fifth of the number of a very frequently exhibited animal such as the giraffe, the 16-fold increase in bongos since the 1970's suggests that zoos have indeed come to understand the animal's biology. Successful breeding efforts such as the one at the National Zoo ensure that future generations of zoogoers will have the opportunity to appreciate these magnificent forest antelopes.