Tuesday 26 March 2024

Miss Waldron's Red Colobus: Any photographs or further information on Fannie Waldron?

 Having started this series with finding out who Miss Waldron was, I shall end it with a request.

I have come across no photographs of Fannie Waldron nor of any that she took, other than the few shown in Willoughby Lowe’s book. Does anybody have photographs or know if they still exist?

Robert William Hayman in his paper which named the monkey for Miss Waldron, states that she retained two skins of the African Golden Cat (now Caracal aurata), one of the grey (from Mampong) and one of the red (from Goaso) colour morphs. I winder what happened to them.

Hayman also saw a Gambian Sun Squirrel (Heliosciurus gambianus) from Pong, Tamale, in the north of what is now Ghana. That was brought back alive and kept by Fannie Waldron. I wonder if anybody who worked for Fannie Waldron left tales of her keeping animals that she brought back?

Finally, having done two collecting trips with Willoughby Lowe why did she not carry on, perhaps attached to another collector? Lowe, as the last chapter covering the 1933-34 and 1934-35 expeditions in his book, The End of the Trail, shows had really reached the end of the trail. Did she try? Or was two a sufficiency?

I just end this series of articles, as so many others, with many unanswered questions.


 Clifford Lees’s Illustration of a Gambian Sun Squirrel for
Angus Booth’s Small Mammals of West Africa.
Longmans 1960.



1 comment:

  1. Just in case you have not found this one - https://www.birdforum.net/threads/waldroni.364267/

    ReplyDelete