The range of the Indian Rhino, aka the Greater one-Horned Rhinoceros once
covered a vast swath of land that stretched across what is known as the
Indo-Gangetic plain.
As this map, taken from a Wiki site shows with the tiny reddish dots, they are now confined
to protected populations in Nepal, Bhutan and India’s state of Assam, where
about two-thirds of the total number of about 3000 live (claims vary, but not
by more than10%).
In an interesting historical note by
one RC Beavan of the Bengal Survey the status of this creature was nicely
summed up, albeit in 1865, in a journal called the Intellectual Observer.
He wrote that it “has been driven by the progress of civilization further
and further from the haunts of men, until now it is to be found only in the
dense untrodden jungles which skirt the base of the Eastern Himalayas, and the
branches of that chain which penetrate Assam.”
I was particularly struck by his
spelling of the name of the major river of the region. He called it the
Burrampooter.
Of the many images of this live
armoured tank available I chose this belligerent-looking character, a photo
taken by Yathin S. Krishnappa and available on a Creative Commons
site.
While poaching is definitely a
threat, a surprising cause of mortality comes from the river. Every year it
floods in spring when the snows of the Himalayas melt and many rhinos drown
before they can leave the riparian swamps and head for the hills.
In a short NDTV news clip video
dated 28 Sept 2012 titled FLOODS, POACHING KAZARINGA’S
DOUBLE TROUBLE the recent poaching of three rhinos in two days was compared the
drowning of some 700 animals in a previous flood seasons. It may be that 700 is
a cumulative number, but that is not clear in the news clip. But flooding is
very definitely a problem. A recent (Jan 2013) DW
report talks of the death of 50 rhinos and also mentions that 30 of them
drowned in 2012.
One of the stranger elements of that
same NDTV news clip is
that the face of a poached rhino, presumably with its horn chopped off, has
been blurred as if it were the genital regions of a human.
More disconcerting than this ultimate
homage to the PC world is that two of the rhinos were still alive. This implies
that someone immobilized them. A vet?
Maybe. It would not be the first time, as members of our profession have been
implicated in some such activities in South Africa. Sad.
In a January 2011 report in the online
Save the Rhino magazine the numbers are reported to
have “recovered from fewer than 200 animals in the early 1990s to more than
2,850 today.”
The story goes on to relate how
translocations from nearby parks is helping to spread the load.
“The translocations are the backbone of the ambitious Indian Rhino
Vision (IRV) 2020 – a partnership among the government of Assam, the
International Rhino Foundation, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Bodoland
Territorial Council, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – that aims to
attain a population of 3,000 wild rhinos in seven of Assam's protected areas by
the year 2020.”
If you have time you can watch a
twenty-minute Youtube
video that tells the same story of the rhino and the translocations from Pobitora
Wildlife Sanctuary and the nearby Kazaringa National Park. Pobitora
is really tiny, in rhino terms. It covers only 39 square kilometres and
something obviously had to be done. The video is a compilation of previous
shorter posts, the first translocation having taken place in 2008.
In that same DW
report there is mention that in Kazaringa NP, home to over 90% of the
state’s rhinos they “lost 18 animals to poachers
last year. Another four were killed in the Pobitora, Orang and Manas national
parks.”
As far as the rhinos in Bhutan and
Nepal are concerned the animal is not safe in either country. A report in an
on-line news letter called Green Fudge dated 24 June 2010 there is an account of the poaching of 24
rhinos in the preceding eleven months. These came from a population of about
400 animals.
Are the
reported different poaching rates in Africa and the Indian sub-continent real
or imagined?
It is
impossible to tell from local websites and reports, but there is one possible
explanation.
As I wrote in my Rhino Poaching and Possible Solutions blog of Jan 3rd there is one major difference. In some Indian parks there are two field staff per square kilometre. In parts of Africa a single ranger is expected to patrol thirty-three square km!
As I wrote in my Rhino Poaching and Possible Solutions blog of Jan 3rd there is one major difference. In some Indian parks there are two field staff per square kilometre. In parts of Africa a single ranger is expected to patrol thirty-three square km!