A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
ibex
The ibex is a wild goat of steep rock, heavily built, with long ridged horns curving back over the shoulders and hooves that split and grip like a pair of pliers. Several species range across the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Ethiopia. Alpine ibex climb the near-vertical masonry of dam walls in northern Italy to lick mineral salts off the concrete.
Etymology
The word is Latin and the Romans took it from a language spoken in the Alps before Latin arrived, the same source that gave them chamois. The German name is steinbock, stone buck, which is also the constellation Capricorn and the reason a certain star sign is drawn as a goat.
Notes
The hooves do the work. The outer rim is hard keratin and the sole is soft and rubbery, so the foot grips like a climbing shoe with a stiff edge, and the two halves spread independently on an uneven hold. Alpine ibex were reduced to a single population in the Gran Paradiso in the nineteenth century and every Alpine ibex alive now descends from those animals, which is why the species carries so little genetic variation.