Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, everyone was ready. Vishnu took a shortcut to the saddle: he grabbed the tips of
his elephant's ears and held on while the beast offered Vishnu her trunk to use as an escalator
and in one smooth motion lifted him to the top of her head. He scrambled around the driver
and found a space on the broad saddle next to Sunder Shrestha, the veterinarian in charge.
Vishnu had begun his career here as a teenager, hauling water and chopping firewood.
After a few years, Hemanta had made him a
shikari
, or tracker. Over time, he and other
young men from his mountain village had become Nepal's best wildlife technicians. Catch-
ing, radio-collaring, and monitoring elephants, leopards, sloth bears, forest deer, and
tigers—man-eaters or more orthodox deer eaters—were all in a day's work for these enthusi-
astic hill tribesmen.
The elephants marched single file to the edge of the broad Rapti River. The pachyderms
squeaked and rumbled as they leaned into the current. Elephants speak in a subsonic language
largely undetectable to the human ear. What we can hear has a deep bubbling quality,
something like gastric distress. But it has great use as a means of communicating with other
elephants over long distances, similar to how whale song transmits across the ocean. The
white rhino and Sumatran rhino are now also known to engage in subsonic dialogue with
other individuals of their kind. For large-mammal species that live at low numbers in dense
habitat, such a trait must be of great use in locating one another, especially when females are
receptive to breeding.
After crossing the Rapti, we fanned out in the tall grass. The elephants swept the area
where Vishnu had found the sleeping rhino. A spotter saw it and waved his arm for the drivers
to form a ring around the animal to prevent him from escaping once he was darted. A drugged
rhino that staggered into the river would drown, and the fallout could scuttle our program be-
fore it even started.
Mel Kali moved in closer, carrying Vishnu and Sunder on her broad back. Faced with a
charging rhino or tiger, a well-trained elephant like Mel will stand her ground, trumpet, and
scare it off. The driver guided her to the sleeping rhino and stopped at a distance of twenty
meters. Sunder took aim at the rhino's enormous rump and—
Pop!
—made a perfect shot. The
red chenille tail of the syringe hung from the rhino's posterior. Snorts of indignation from the
front end heralded an imminent charge, but the attack never materialized because the narcotic
quickly entered the rhino's nervous system. Sunder's textbook on wild animal capture indic-
ated an eight-minute lapse between injection and sedation. He checked his watch; everything
was running flawlessly.
The rhino stood motionless as the drug worked its magic. I squeezed the radio collar I was
holding and glanced at my watch, the seconds ticking away, until the rhino sank to the ground
at the edge of the forest. Finally, we dismounted. “So far, so good,” I thought. Before giving
the green light to begin work, however, Sunder waved me and the others back, saying, “Let
