Gemsbok in Mountain Zebra National Park

Oryx gazella

Chance of an encounter
Very likely

Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Mountain Zebra National Park, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.

Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.

The evidence here

Grid cells
1
Records
3
Cell size
10 km
Years covered
2012 to 2026

A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 1 square of 10 km carry records for Gemsbok in and around Mountain Zebra National Park, and the 3 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.

About the Gemsbok

The gemsbok is the desert answering the question of what an antelope should be. Half a meter of straight rapier horn on a 200-kilogram body, painted in gray, black and white like a heraldic shield, it thrives where most mammals die: it can live without drinking for weeks, taking moisture from roots, melons and night-cooled grass, and it survives body temperatures that would cook a human brain by cooling the blood bound for its head through a lattice of nasal vessels. Namibia has tens of thousands of them, and no photograph of a red dune is quite complete without one standing on it. Both sexes carry horns, and lionesses have been killed misjudging them.

The full field guide entry, and everywhere else it is recorded

Before you go

In hot months do not hold herds away from water or shade with a parked vehicle; heat is their real predator.