The Schlup Scoop: Rhino Capture

By the second week on Thanda, we'd settled into a routine of anticipating unplanned things to crop up on any day, at any time. A large part of the last several days revolved around C1: A white rhino cow that we needed to find, dart, and load into a truck to be transported to another reserve. Wait, what?! We need to load a rhino into a truck? Isn't that ... difficult?

It turns out that finding a rhino, despite it being the largest animal on the park after the elephant, isn't easy. They like grazing in the bushveld, where they disappear into thin air behind bushes that are, oddly, almost exactly the same size as the rhino are. We drove around the park a lot. Six hours one morning, four hours that night. Every once in a while we'd find a rhino or two, but not the one we wanted, as identified by ear markings. We'd rattle along the dirt road, spot a hulking shadow in the distance, screetch to a halt and kill the engine. Then get out the binoculars and strain through the scrub in the fading light, waiting for the rhino to turn his or her head just so, so that we could see both ears at the same time. The only thing that made it easier was that our cow was most likely to be hanging out with another cow, but since they were neither mother-daughter nor sisters, that wasn't guaranteed either.

Right at dusk we found her (and her buddy). We drove home happy in the knowledge that we had at least a vague idea of where to start looking the next morning. The morning was grey and heavy, and it had rained at night, so we packed our rain gear. But it was no match for the day. We found our rhino and radioed her location and waited for the game capture crew to roll up with their transport truck. And we waited. And waited. The rain poured on, the rhino grazed its way through the thickets, and we sat on the truck in the rain, keeping a keen eye on the rhino so as not to lose her. It rained, we waited. For hours. We got occasional updates from the others, murmurs of delays and the truck getting stuck. To shelter us, Michelle parked the truck under an acacia tree just by the side of the road, so we waited in slightly less rain, in the cold, and watched little white worms dropping down into the truck and onto us. By this time, we were over this rhino thing and ready to go home, but we'd waited so long that we didn't want to miss the action when it happened. It was only when the crew radioed that their truck had got stuck that Michelle finally threw in the towel and called off the operation. She's a tough cookie, that girl.

So, the exercise of finding C1 started all over again the next day. We briefly looked for the dogs, established a rough location for them, and started driving around the park again. That day it was unbearably hot, the sun beating down from a clear blue sky. We drove all day, with four trucks all looking for her by the afternoon, racing the clock to try capture her that day. The sun lowered to the horizon, shadows lengthening. No sign of the rhino. It was pretty clear to us, though, that unless she were right on the road, we had almost no chance of spotting her. We also had no idea which part of the park she'd be in, since they can cover a lot of ground in a day. The sky turned red, the sun went down, we went home.

On our final pass-by of the water holes, we saw the lion, and a short while later, we squealed in surprise as we saw a leopard leap across the road! Full brakes, kill the engine. The leopard had already disappeared into the grass, but we patiently waited, in complete silence, for her to calm down after her shock of seeing us. Eventually, gingerly, she lifted her head just above the grass and eyed us cautiously. They're super shy animals, so we were unbelievably fortunate to have spotted her. Michelle pulled out her hyper telephoto lens and captured identification photos while we were all mesmerized.

The rhino capture was starting to cost the park and they decided that if we couldn't find her by the next morning, they'd call in a helicopter crew to find her. We were on the road at 3:30, even earlier than usual, to start searching at absolute first light. Prepared for another super-long day, we'd packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (again) to augment our peanut butter and jelly toast breakfast (again). In the way of these things: C1 was right on the road. We could have driven into her. What luck! We radioed the crews and waited (again). C1 isn't a cow that hangs around, so she and her buddy started her on-the-move grazing (again) and we tried to follow her, but we lost her and found her again many times through the thickets. By this time, another three vehicles showed up to help. With teamwork and Michelle's excellent knowledge of the roads and tracks, the capture team (a team including a vet and specialists in wild game transfers) finally darted her.

They radioed us where she'd stopped running in her half-daze, and we rolled up to help with the second part, loading into the truck. When she was down, she was much bigger than the B5 bull we'd worked with the previous week. This girl was huge. The dart crew brought her half-back to awareness and instructed us to help push her back to her feet and help her walk toward the truck. Surprisingly, this worked. With a rope tied to her horn guiding her direction, cattle prods (ouch) making her move forward, and four people to a side stopping her from falling over, we got her to the truck. A final push up the ramp, and she was in. What a morning! - it wasn't even 9 o'clock yet.