Description

The mountain nyala is one of Africa’s most striking and restricted large mammals, endemic to the Ethiopian highlands between 2,500 and 4,000 m elevation. Males are massive and darkly grizzled, with long spiral horns up to a meter in length, a white chevron between the eyes, and faint vertical flank stripes. Females are smaller and lighter, often hornless.

This species thrives in Afromontane juniper and Hagenia forests, feeding on leaves, shoots, herbs, and occasionally crops when forced downslope. It belongs to the same evolutionary lineage as kudu and bushbuck but is the most cold-adapted and high-altitude of the group — an antelope that swapped savannas for frost-dusted forests.

Today, its range is limited to a few pockets of southern Ethiopia, mainly Bale Mountains National Park, Arsi Mountains, and Harenna Forest, where population fragmentation and hunting have reduced its numbers to perhaps 2,000 individuals.