About this book
WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
I have spent more than 60 years in Ethiopia exploring and experiencing the wildlife of this country. This has resulted in thousands of pictures. My wish is to share this treasure with the people of Ethiopia. In this way, I show the abundance of wildlife that Ethiopia still hosts – there are about 850 bird species and about 250 mammals. I hope that this knowledge will encourage people to preserve and protect the wildlife and the habitats for coming generations before it is too late.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
I have chosen to divide the book into sections which are mainly delimited by mountain ranges, rivers, and roads. Several mammals and birds occur in one or more of the sections. In the table of contents, as well as in the beginning of each chapter, there is a map illustrating the places mentioned in each chapter. The last chapter is called Look-alikes. Its purpose is to illustrate some of the key differences between “look-alike” mammals and birds.
THE CHAPTERS
There are altogether eight chapters, seven of which describe the geographically defined sections. There is an introduction to each chapter describing the characteristic features of the habitats, the rare and common wildlife of that specific area, as well as some historical and cultural attractions.
Most of the national parks and wildlife sanctuaries in Ethiopia are mentioned in the introductions. Some are well-known and have been open to visitors for many years. Others have been opened up recently, to which I have partly contributed together with central and local authorities. Travelling around exploring the wildlife of this country is both exciting and unpredictable. The reader should be aware of the fact that some images in this book show mammals and birds very rarely seen. During all these years of game viewing, there are some species I have only seen a few times, or just once.
Håkan Pohlstrand
TAXONOMY AND SYSTEMATICS
The famous Swedish scientist Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus), living in the 18th century, stated that “If you don’t know the names, your knowledge about the things also disappears.” It is important to be able to name species, to have a language that everyone understands. Animals and plants often have different names depending on which taxonomist you ask. A taxon is a group of one or more populations of an organism considered by taxonomists to form a unit, for example a species. Sometimes a taxon is regarded as a species, and sometimes as a subspecies. For example, the Groundscraper Thrush in Ethiopia is, according to the taxonomy we have chosen to follow in this book – IOC World Bird List ver. 7.3 – a species with the scientific name Turdus litsitsirupa simensis, meaning that it belongs to the genus Turdus, with the species name litsitsirupa and the subspecies name simensis. But according to a different taxonomy, or list, e.g. The Handbook of the Birds of the World / BirdLife International, this taxon is classified as the Ethiopian Thrush Psophocichla simensis simensis, meaning that it has been split from the Groundscraper Thrush in southern Africa, and is regarded as a monotypic species.
Due to our increased knowledge of species, we have to live with rapid changes in taxonomy. Still we aim to follow one list, and for the birds in this book we have, as mentioned above, chosen to follow the list presented by International Ornithological Congress (IOC). For the mammals we have decided to mainly follow The Handbook of the Mammals of the World, but for some mammal species we have chosen to follow other authorities. One thing is certain, there will always be some taxonomic “tough nuts”, and lots of taxonomic work remains to be done, not least on Ethiopian mammals.
Tomas Carlberg |
