Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Terai lowlands. Now these areas were well protected and ready to accommodate their former
residents.
So, in the early evening of a winter night in 1986, I found myself riding shotgun in one of
three timber lorries the government had provided for transport. The payloads were three tran-
quilized but awake rhinos housed in giant wooden crates. Captured earlier in the day, they
were bound for Bardia, 250 kilometers to the west. Under the full moon, our caravan rumbled
cautiously along the winding roads of southern Nepal. I sat in the cab listening to Vishnu's
stories, which took my mind off how risky this venture seemed every time our rhino passen-
ger shifted in her crate.
After fifteen hours, one flat tire, and one truck temporarily stuck in a river, we made it
to the release site in Royal Bardia National Park. By now, Vishnu and his team had perfec-
ted the capture-and-release protocol. The door of the first crate was opened, and out rushed
the first female rhino. The next animal to be released, a subadult male, burst out looking for
something in his path to crush. The last rhino to be unleashed also seemed ready to charge
but changed her mind and walked into the tall grass.
Ironically, attempts to translocate and recover some of the mammals smaller than rhinos
proved much more difficult. Blackbucks—a beautiful antelope species—moved from a wild
animal park setting into protected areas thrived at first but then disappeared if the grass grew
too tall and gave cover to hunting tigers. The smaller, more highly strung deer and antelope
also had high mortality during capture and translocation. No one could capture bristly rabbits.
Although pygmy hogs have recently been captive bred and released back into the wild in In-
dia to create new populations, captive breeding of musk deer had stalled because of signific-
ant mortality during the process. For some reason, the greater one-horned rhinos responded
beautifully to the morphine derivative used to sedate them. Could this be one more aspect
of their rugged nature? Perhaps those same selection pressures for resistance and resilience
made them, however inadvertently, easier subjects to ship out for restoration.
Those first three translocated rhinos were eventually joined by ten others. In late Decem-
ber, seven days after starting the capture operation, we left Bardia, having deposited the last
of the group of thirteen. When we captured the rhinos for this translocation, I had touched the
horns of each. I wondered how the fate of the five rhino species might have differed had they
never evolved facial horns. Would their size and habitat specialization still have rendered
them so endangered? The absence of a horn, or even the drastic measure of dehorning rhi-
nos—tried in Namibia and Zimbabwe to deter poachers—would have little effect on a ma-
jor threat to their survival posed by habitat loss, as is the case today. On the way back to
Chitwan, we drove through one poor mud-walled village after another. The rice harvest had
just been taken in, and stacks of straw lined the way. In this region, with one of the world's
highest birthrates, pressures on land and critical rhino habitat could only escalate.
