Quagga [Quagga Project Association]	Bluebuck

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, explorers and settlers recorded many wild animals in Cape Town, including Brown Hyena, Cape Fox, Caracal, Eland, Cape Leopard, Cape Lion, Mountain Zebra and Porcupine. In the spring of 1659, Jan van Riebeeck recorded in his diary that they had found (probably where Sea Point is today) “the clothing, skull and bones” of a soldier who had gone missing two weeks previously, and that the skull was “half bitten off, so it is presumed that he was devoured by a lion”.

It did not take the settlers long to destroy most of the large wild animals in and around Cape Town. Most of these animals still survive outside the Fynbos Biome, but by the end of the eighteenth century the settlers had caused the Bluebuck to go extinct. By the mid 1800s, the Quagga was also extinct. Only a few Bontebok remained in the Bredasdorp area.

• Bontebok, which were saved from extinction by a farmer in Bredasdorp, are now found in the Table Mountain National Park, Helderberg Nature Reserve and Tygerberg Nature Reserve
• Eland, Mountain Zebra and Klipspringer are found in the Table Mountain National Park
• Hippopotami were reintroduced to Rondevlei Nature Reserve in the 1980s.

Bontebok	Eland	Hippopotamus

In this section we will find out about some of the threatened animals in the lowlands of Cape Town.