A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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saiga
The saiga is an antelope of the Central Asian steppe with an extraordinary nose: a swollen, downward-pointing, flexible proboscis with the nostrils opening at the tip. It filters dust in summer and warms and humidifies freezing air in winter. Saiga migrate long distances across open grassland in enormous herds, and males carry translucent amber ridged horns.
Etymology
The name came into English through Russian from a Turkic language of the steppe. The animal appears in the fossil record across a range that once ran from Britain to Alaska, and it is one of the species drawn in the European Paleolithic caves.
Notes
The nose is the thing everyone remembers and it is without parallel among hoofed animals. It also functions in display and in producing the roaring call males make in the rut, when the proboscis inflates further. Saiga calve in a synchronized burst over about a week, with almost every female giving birth within days of every other, which floods the ground with more calves than predators can take.