Word: oryx
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...light plane buzzed through the clear morning air above Kenya's Tsavo National Park. In the rolling bushland below grazed herds of zebra, kudu, oryx and hartebeest, swishing away flies with their tails. Suddenly, from the middle of a patch of thorn trees, flashed the white flick of an egret, constant companion of the African elephant. It was what the pilot had been looking for. He radioed the position to the ground, and within minutes a helicopter arrived. Two white hunters climbed out and disappeared into the tangle of thorn trees. There was a burst of high-powered rifle...
...Oryxes are in trouble in Araby be cause of the local conviction that the horns of an oryx give sexual vigor when ground into powder and eaten. Today oil-rich Arabs are so eager for vigor that they chase down oryxes in high-powered cars or even in airplanes, and slaughter them with machine guns. As a result, hardly an oryx is left alive in its native desert...
Last year, to foil the vigor seekers, the Fauna Preservation Society of Lon don launched Operation Oryx. Led by Major Ian R. Grimwood, chief game warden of Kenya Colony, an expedition of oryx savers spent two months in the deserts of Aden Protectorate in southern Arabia. They sighted four oryxes, lassoed three of them from a specially built car and brought them safely back alive...
Never were visitors treated with more tender care. While they get used to their new surroundings, the oryxes are kept in semi-isolation and watched constantly by zoo officials. All food and water equipment is sterilized, and the few visitors admitted to the enclosures are made to dunk their shoes in an antiseptic solution to keep out infection. To protect the oryxes from unfamiliar thorns, all cacti except giant saguaros have been removed, and the thorns of the saguaros have been clipped to a height above the reach of an oryx. Every day the zoo fills out a sheet...
...achievement as a naturalist. No less than four separate species of snake bear his Latinized name as their discoverer, and 22 species of rare mammals have been hunted down by Ionides for zoos and museums, including the Addra gazelle, the sassaby, the Nubian ibex and the scimitar-horned white oryx...