I was watching a hunting video and the hunter took a common reedbuck. I thought it looked nice, somewhere in-between the waterbuck and lechwe, so I'm thinking of adding one to my list of animals I'd like to harvest while on safari. Anyway, I'm curious as to why some of them look like the horns have seperated from the base of the head? It looks like the outer part of the horn stopped growing, but the inside part continues to grow. Can someone explain what this really is or why this happens?

Sevens

On an immature Reedbuck, there will be a considerable amount of basal pulp around the base of the horn. This is soft horn material that has yet to harden. The older the Reedbuck, the harder the material gets. When scoring a Reedbuck, this soft, basal pulp does not get measured, only the hardened horn is scored.

Here's a few photos of my reedbuck skulls. The larger one is a common reedbuck and the smaller one is a mountain reedbuck. They are both great critters to hunt. Here you can see the horn structure:



And a close up of each at the base, they do have a smallish boss.

To add to Mike416Rigby's post, the basal pulp is not taken into account on an SCI measurement, it is on a Rowland Ward measurement. As Mike say's the pulp hardens as the animal get's older, but it never completely hardens out and it occurs to some extent on even the oldest of animals.

The best area I know of for both common & mountain reedbuck is the area we use in KZN where almost every one I've ever taken there in the last 15 years has exceeded the Rowland Ward minimum.

And a really useless piece of information on the reedbucks and esp the mountain reedbuck is that if they're hit and not killed by the hunter they they will almost always just stand and look at you which gives you time to put in a second shot.

When dressing out my Mt. Reedbuck, I noticed two small skin "pockets" on both insides of the bucks inner thigh area. My PH said these were normal but what are they for? Are these some sort of prehistoric marsupial like creature?

Those may have been the outward manifestations of the reedbuck's inguinal glands, which secrete a waxy substance used by the animal to mark its territory.



As an aside, I once shot a common reedbuck, only to have it screech and bound off. We followed it up and I killed it, but my PH assured me that the screeching noise came from the rapid expulsion of air from its glands, rather than its vocal chords.



At least one reference I have seen (Collins Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa) seems to corroborate this, although I have found no definitive statement that it is, in fact, true.