From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Bontebok (Damaliscus pygargus phillipsi) is the most genetically uniform large mammal on earth. This is because in 1837 there were fewer than twenty left. Shot, by then, to the edge of extinction by hunting and habitat loss across the coastal plains of the Western Cape. A farmer named Pieter van der Byl, on his farm near the Breede River, stopped the shooting and started protecting what remained. The herd on his farm was all that existed of the species. Every bontebok alive today — every individual in every herd, in every reserve, carrying the specific deep chestnut coat and the white face and the clean white rump — is descended from those animals. The author notes the number. He notes the name. He notes that the author of this recovery had a farm near a river and made a decision, and that the decision has produced approximately three thousand five hundred animals. He notes that this is the most important sentence in this entry and does not require elaboration.”

He had nearly driven past the sign.

Western Cape. Late afternoon. The road was going where roads go in the Western Cape, which is generally through country that is beautiful in a way that does not require the observer to slow down, and he had been making progress when the sign appeared and he had turned into the reserve on the basis that bontebok were listed on the board and he had a note in his field file saying bontebok — entry pending from an earlier season.

The small herd was in the fynbos-edge grassland. Seven animals. He stopped.

They were beautiful. He had not been expecting beautiful. He had been expecting the kind of antelope that requires taxonomic concentration and yields ecological interest. These were beautiful immediately, without requiring study: the deep chestnut coat, the white face with its clean blaze, the white rump and lower legs, the specific quality of them against the fynbos in the Western Cape afternoon light.

He opened his field notes.

The first entry was brief: Bontebok. Western Cape. Small herd, approximately seven individuals. Good specimens.

He had written this and was about to turn to the adjacent page when he noticed the file note clipped beneath the entry. He had been carrying it since Cape Town.

Fewer than twenty animals.

He read it twice.

By 1837, the bontebok — which had been common across the coastal plains of the Western Cape in the numbers that common meant before the preceding century — had been reduced to fewer than twenty. Not fewer than twenty thousand. Fewer than twenty. Singular animals, countable, in a world that had previously contained hundreds of thousands.

One farmer had noticed. Pieter van der Byl, on his farm along the Breede River. He had stopped the shooting on his land and watched over the animals that remained. He did not fully understand genetics. He did not fully understand minimum viable populations. He understood that there were not many left and that this was a situation requiring a response.

The animals on his farm survived. Their offspring survived. The species survived — not in the wild, not broadly, but on one farm, under the attention of one man who had made one decision.

The current population: approximately three thousand five hundred. Every one of them descended from the animals Pieter van der Byl had walked among on his farm in the years after 1837.

The Colonel looked at the seven animals in the fynbos.