This guide is unusual in that the writer is also the illustrator, and in the second role I owe a number of special thanks, not least to the mammal curators at the British Museum of Natural History and once more to David Harrison. Special thanks go to Esther Wenman formerly of London Zoo and also to Terry Moore and his colleagues at the Cat Survival Trust, through whom I was able to get unprecedented access to Caracals and Swamp Cats under near natural conditions.
At the American University in Cairo Press I would like to express my gratitude to Arnold Tovell, without whose support this project might have never got off the ground, and to Neil Hewison for his patience over the years when it may have looked as though, having got off the ground, it was never going to land! I am also grateful to Neil for his help with the Arabic names. Thanks also to Matthew Carrington, Sigrún Valsdóttir, my copyeditor Meghan Lynch Schwartz, and designer Andrea El-Akshar.
Many friends and colleagues gave their support over the years spent on the guide. Virginia McKenna of the BornFree Foundation and Julie Wartenberg of WSPA deserve particular mention as do Abdel Aziz Ezz El Arab, Fadel Assabghy, Omar Attum, Dave Blanks, Kate Coffield, Tom Coles, Lillian Craig-Harris, Robin Donkin, Sheryl Ducummon, Mahmoud Farag, the late John Gerhart, Dalia Ghanem, Alan Goulty, Anahid Harrison, Renate Hubinger, Salima Ikram, Chris Magin, Petra Roeglin, Marietta Sawert, Sara El Sayed, Rolf Schmidt, Armin Schröker, Nazli Shank, and Cluny South. Thanks as ever go to my family.
Any field guide is the result of an accumulation of knowledge from a wide variety of sources, and this guide is no exception. Innumerable books, articles, and papers have been consulted, the most important of which are listed in the Selected Bibliography. Museum collections have been examined, reports and observations from reliable observers have been compiled, and to this mélange of data has been added my own experience in the field. However, it is important to specifically acknowledge certain key texts, without which this guide would not have been possible.
The first comprehensive work devoted to the contemporary mammals of Egypt was John Anderson’s Zoology of Egypt: Mammalia, published in 1902. Now very difficult to find, it is a striking tome, and while the text and the taxonomy are inevitably dated, the plates, even a century later, are still stunning for their beauty and their accuracy. However, the landmark text on the mammals of the political entity that is modern Egypt is The Contemporary Land Mammals of Egypt (Including Sinai) by Dale Osborn and Ibrahim Helmy, published in 1980. It is this text that is the springboard for the current field guide, and the measurements and ranges of many of the mammal species described in these pages are based on Osborn and Helmy. Measurements have been confirmed whenever possible to museum specimens, and ranges have been adjusted in accordance with more recent research. Even in the relatively short time since 1980, there have been many changes in our understanding of Egypt’s mammal fauna. Some of these changes are taxonomic. For instance, while Osborn and Helmy recognized four species of hedgehog from Egypt, most authors now recognize just two. The classification of the shrews, gerbils, and gazelles is particularly open to debate, and the current author has generally followed Nowak (1999 ed.) in these instances. At the more contentious level of subspecies, again the work of Osborn and Helmy has generally been followed. Other changes relate to recent research. Since Osborn and Helmy, certain additional species have been added to Egypt’s mammal fauna, for instance the Marbled Polecat. An extremely valuable text for species in Sinai, or species very rare in Egypt but more widespread in the Middle East has been The Mammals of Arabia (1991 ed.) by David Harrison and Paul Bates. For anyone needing information on skull and dental characteristics and other information beyond the scope of a field guide, these texts are invaluable and both include extensive bibliographies that take the researcher back to primary sources. Full bibliographic data on these texts can be found in the Selected Bibliography.
Osborn and Helmy did not include the bat fauna of Egypt, and in this case two key texts have been used as a starting point for this guide. The first is the aforementioned Harrison and Bates, the second is Qumsiyeh’s The Bats of Egypt (1985). It is from these texts that the key measurements for Egyptian bat species have been taken, confirmed whenever possible to museum specimens.
Marine mammals, the cetaceans and the sirenians, were not covered by Osborn and Helmy, and in this instance records have been found by going back into the scientific literature or by the sight records (in at least one instance supported by photographs) of reliable observers. In the Red Sea it has been possible to use Key Environments: Red Sea (1987) by Edwards and Head, published in collaboration with the IUCN. The authors of this text note in their introduction to the cetaceans that, “despite their relatively large size, our knowledge of cetaceans in the Red Sea is extremely fragmentary.” With the dramatic increase of tourism in the Egyptian Red Sea, and in particular dive tourism often on live-aboard boats, the number of records of whale and dolphin species should increase. For this reason, a number of species confirmed by Edwards and Head from the southern Red Sea and possible but not confirmed from Egyptian waters, have been included in the plates.
Seminal though the scientific texts are for anyone claiming expertise in the mammal fauna of Egypt, the necessarily academic prose and the proliferation of scientific minutiae is frequently offputting to a wider audience, an audience it is becoming increasingly important to access. Egypt’s mammal fauna is everywhere threatened by an ever-expanding human population, by direct hunting and by rampant urbanization. Nowhere is this clearer than in the proliferation of tourist developments along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts.
The wholesale destruction of the Mediterranean coast and the oft-quoted aim of creating a “Red Sea Riviera” might seem to cast an ominous shadow over the future of these environments. The explosion of four-wheel drive tourism from these new tourist cities indeed represents a serious threat to a fragile desert environment. Yet potential catastrophe is also potential opportunity. A desert where all there is to see is desert and the myriad of tracks of previous ‘pioneers,’ will attract no one. A vibrant, living desert, a desert with jirds, gerbils, and jerboas, with foxes and hares, hyraxes, ibexes and gazelles, will be an environmental asset to preserve and treasure. We must work to prevent the former scenario and to encourage the latter. Anyone fortunate enough to have experienced a first encounter with wild gazelles in the vastness of the Egyptian desert will know exactly what I mean.
This is where this Field Guide comes in. While it must retain the scientific rigor and accuracy to be a valuable tool for the expert, it is also a celebration of the diversity of Egypt’s mammal fauna aimed at a new and growing audience of visitors, foreign and local, to Egypt’s wilder places at sea and on land. Gone are the black-and-white photographs of carefully preserved museum cadavers, and for the first time all of Egypt’s mammals are accurately portrayed, mainly in color, as alive and alert as in nature. The guide is designed to fill a growing need among this new generation of visitors and explorers and to foster and encourage further recruits to Egypt’s growing environmentalist movement.
The political entity of Egypt makes up the northeasternmost corner of the African continent, together with the Sinai Peninsula. It has an area of c. 1,019,449km2, of which around 18,000km2 are administered by Sudan (Sudan Government Administration Area). The land borders to the north and east are clearly defined by the coastal areas bordering the Mediterranean and Red Seas respectively, but to the west and south, as well as the eastern land frontier, the borders follow no natural boundaries but are colonial legacies; to the south with Sudan, the west, Libya, and the east, Palestine and Israel. While beyond the immediate concerns of zoologists, these artificial boundaries are important since