Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
The Uncommon
Menagerie
R
IDING ON AN ELEPHANT'S BACK
offers a privileged, if distorted, perspective on the natural
world. Wildlife species that seem large and scary at eye level, such as rhinos and tigers,
appear as miniaturized versions from this elevated vantage. My well-trained mount, Kirti Kali,
plowed boldly through the dense twenty-foot-tall grasslands of Chitwan National Park in low-
land Nepal, scattering spotted deer and wild boars in our path. On elephant-back one feels
invincible. As we emerged from the tall grass into an open area, my driver, Gyan Bahadur,
calmly steered Kirti alongside a rare greater one-horned rhinoceros—a dangerous species that,
locally, tramples and kills several villagers a year. The two-ton female and her young calf con-
tinued grazing peacefully on the floodplain. The rhinos seemed oblivious to our presence be-
cause we had spent months habituating these aggressive creatures to close contact. As long as
we remained on the elephant, rather than approaching on foot, the mother rhino would remain
unfazed and we would stay in one piece.
My jungle wanderings also warped my perspective on how uncommon these animals had
become. By 1988, at the end of my initial five years of research, I had recorded thousands
of observations of Chitwan's 370 one-horned rhinos and had photographed, identified, and
named nearly every one. Yet seeing them every day made me forget their global rarity. At
the time, only about 1,500 survived in the wild worldwide; all but those in Chitwan roamed
in Kaziranga National Park in northeastern India. Although the one-horned rhino's numbers
have slowly increased since then—in 2012 there were over 2,900, distributed among twelve
populations—this species remains among the most endangered large mammals on Earth. Its
status during my initial study raised several questions: Had the ancestors of this rhino, a di-
verse ancient lineage, always been rare during their evolutionary history? Or is the rarity of
