Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
atively intact. Before 1950, there is every reason to believe, rhino numbers in Chitwan ex-
ceeded 1,000 individuals, a healthy population by any count.
In the mid-twentieth century, several political and social changes in Nepal and India in-
directly contributed to the rhinos' steep decline and then to their beginning recovery. First
came the fall in the early 1950s of the autocratic Rana kings who had ruled the country for
one hundred years. The Ranas' overthrow reversed the policy of using the Terai forests as a
malaria-ridden barrier to ward off would-be invaders (the British) from the south. The threat
of invasion disappeared with India's attainment of independence from Britain, and beginning
in the late 1950s, malaria eradication programs in the Terai—financed largely by foreign aid
agencies—brought the scourge under control. This opened the Chitwan Valley to settlement
by the tens of thousands of impoverished hill farmers who streamed in from all over Nepal.
Unfortunately for the greater one-horned rhino, its preferred feeding areas, covered in wild
sugarcane, also made the most productive rice paddies. The human population in this region
rose from 36,000 to 100,000 in a decade. By 1960, the entire length of the 160-kilometer-
long valley was inhabited, and most of the forest and grassland habitat had been converted to
a brilliantly colored mosaic of mustard, rice, and maize. Similarly, malaria control in India
across the entire Terai belt, including along the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers, spurred rap-
id land conversion. In a few decades, the Terai elephant-grass ecosystem shrank to less than
2 percent of its original range.
Other threats emerged to the rhinos' well-being, as well as to that of Chitwan's other fam-
ous charismatic large mammal, the tiger. By the late 1950s, hunters had dispersed throughout
the Chitwan Valley, poaching the rhino for its valuable horn and tigers for their bones and
skin and the male's penis. Before the eradication of malaria in the area, the density of tigers
must have been staggering, perhaps among the highest in the world. During a royal hunt led
by the Rana kings of Nepal in the winter of 1938, during the two-month window when the
malaria-carrying mosquitoes were inactive, 125 tigers were shot in a relatively small part of
Chitwan. To put this in perspective, the number of tigers shot in that narrow section of no
more than 50 kilometers long and a few kilometers wide in 1938 equals about half the number
of adult tigers occupying, in 2012, what is now the Terai Arc Landscape—a 1,000-kilometer
stretch of eleven tiger reserves and connecting jungles across lowland Nepal and adjacent In-
dia.
With continued settlement and expanded rice cultivation, the rhino population plummeted.
The first wildlife biologist to visit the area, the famed E. P. Gee in 1959, estimated that only
300 individuals were left at the time. The precipitous decline of rhinoceroses and tigers, just
after Gee's survey, eventually led to the creation of Royal Chitwan National Park in 1973
and, two years later, to two other wildlife reserves—Royal Bardia National Park and Suk-
laphanta Wildlife Reserve—both former royal hunting reserves. In 1975, the British graduate
student Andrew Laurie, the first to conduct a field study of greater one-horned rhinoceroses
