How many northern white rhinos are left

He promised the dying rhino that he would share the tragedy of the northern whites with the rest of the world — that he would convert that sorrow into an energy that might help rescue other species. Out in the field, Mwenda stalks the girls with a fancy, long-lensed camera, a gift from a foreign friend. Sometimes, he will lie in the grass to get interesting angles for his followers.

Mwenda would like to change the way people think about African travel, to break the paradigm of tourists staring out of car windows, marking animals off of checklists and moving on. Just as you would want to spend time with a friend, or with a new person. To get to know who they are, how they live, how they do things. The same thing with these girls. The girls spend their days grazing, from dawn to dusk, in a acre field.

It is protected by a tall electric fence, along one side of which runs a road where safari vehicles can stop to look. Sometimes there are traffic jams. Najin and Fatu may not be quite as famous as Sudan, but they are still well known in safari circles — still bucket-list creatures.

Four times a day, a truckload of visitors who have paid a special fee and signed safety waivers are allowed to come inside the enclosure. The girls surround the truck, eating snacks, while the tourists Chinese, Australian, German, American take photos.

I spent one week out in the field with the girls. I would go to them at dawn and leave when the sun set. But out there in the field, time hung thick like fog. Every day felt like a sliver of eternity.

It was the cold season in Kenya, and I stood there through every kind of weather, under orange skies and yellow skies and skies as gray as the girls. I watched Fatu get mad at an egret that landed on her back and try to buck it off. I watched Najin dip her huge head into the water trough and drink so gently, with such delicate sips, that she hardly left a ripple.

I watched dung beetles roll perfect spheres of rhino poop, then struggle to wrestle them off to their nests through tall grass. I watched the girls sharpen their horns, clumsily, adorably, on a little metal gate, scraping the paint right off, threatening to tear the whole thing from its hinges.

I was chased, briefly, by a blind buffalo named Russell. I saw Fatu shock herself one morning on the electric fence, right on the face — she flinched and raced off, at a speed faster than I knew rhinos could run, and a terrified Najin turned and ran right alongside her. During thunderstorms, I stood there getting soaked, watching the girls change color — chocolatey, glistening — as the dust on their backs turned, drop by drop, into mud. One day I held a cantaloupe-size ball of rhino poop in my palm, then broke it in half: pure grass.

I spent an unbelievable number of hours just watching the girls graze. That might sound boring, but they elevate it to an art form. White rhino snouts are flat, like vacuum attachments, and they tear the grass not with their teeth but with their lips, which are ridged to clamp the tiniest shoots.

They can find grass in what looks like a bare patch of dirt. As they graze, the girls swing their heads back and forth, tearing and chewing, tearing and chewing, crunching every mouthful with the sound of muffled thunder. I kept wondering: How could these tiny plants support creatures so huge? And how could grass ever be so loud? One day, just after dawn, I got to give Najin her morning scratchdown. JoJo was scratching her, as he did most mornings, and when he stopped, Najin stood there, waiting, seeming to want more.

I did. I walked over to the mother rhino, curled my fingers and — a little hesitantly, much more tentatively than JoJo — started to scratch. I scratched her temple, her neck, her big thick folds. I felt her roughness and her softness. But she stood there anyway, accepting it — and then when I stopped, she swiveled her long head over toward me, stared at me, held still. JoJo said this meant she was asking for more. So I kept scratching. Most of us are taught that rhinos are exotic.

Perhaps no animal has been more widely misunderstood, especially in the West. For over 1, years, the historian Kelly Enright points out, not a single rhino was seen in Europe.

In that absence, misinformation bloomed. Even today, in the modern world, rhinos are mythologized and fetishized to the point of unreality. We look at them like dinosaurs who have outlasted their time, even though they are no older than horses. We see their horns as strange and fantastical, but in fact they are only compressed keratin, the same material that makes up our hair. The same material, in fact, that made up the fingernails I was using to scratch Najin.

Being with the girls, seeing the lives they share with their caretakers, is the perfect antidote to any exoticism. The men treat the rhinos like a cross between little sisters and very good dogs and prize cows and great-grandmothers. The relationship is not predatory, not extractive. All the small daily interactions — the petting and scratching, the nicknames, the looks — are exchanges of currencies so ancient that they are impossible to hoard and hardly even need names: kindness, comfort, friction, warmth, pleasure, presence, safety.

Just down the road from the girls, Ol Pejeta has a rhinoceros memorial. It is a place of deep sadness. A few of the honored animals were famous and highly protected, and therefore able to die of natural causes: Suni and Sudan, for instance, the last two male northern whites. But a vast majority were not famous, and their lives ended terribly, at the hands of poachers. They were shot by guns or poison arrows, their horns cut off. Some died quickly, but others survived for weeks before succumbing to their injuries.

She was 12 months pregnant. Max, a 6-year-old white rhino, had had his horns pre-emptively sawed off by rangers, to dissuade the poachers. But the poachers shot him anyway, perhaps just out of spite.

Even on a wildlife conservancy, it is impossible to protect every animal. Ol Pejeta is huge, and it is surrounded, on every side, by desperate poverty.

On the black market, rhino horn is worth more than gold. The law of supply and demand dictates that the closer rhinos get to extinction, the more valuable their horns become. Although the killing happens locally, the market is international and controlled by highly organized crime syndicates. Powdered rhino horn, in fact, is sometimes consumed like a drug: People mix it with wine at parties in Vietnam.

In recent years, poaching has increased rapidly. The girls, in the absence of armed guards, would probably be killed immediately. Some billionaire would no doubt pay a fortune to own the horns of the last two northern whites.

In the face of all this gloom, and against very steep odds, there is still a last-ditch effort to save the subspecies. Since the s, scientists have been collecting tissues from the northern whites. Many of these are housed, at several hundred degrees below zero, in the Frozen Zoo, part of a San Diego research center. Like many large animals, rhinos are finicky breeders.

Both Najin and Fatu have reproductive problems; neither can carry a baby to term. But their eggs, fertilized with frozen sperm and implanted into the uterus of a healthy southern white rhino , may still be able to create a viable calf. It is a reproductive hail Mary, but it is also the best option left. Some of the possible outcomes were bad: They might have no eggs, or no viable eggs; or the operation could go wrong, and one or both of the animals could die. Zacharia Mutai, the head rhino caretaker and a quiet, stoic man, told me that he was so stressed he was having trouble sleeping.

Anything we are leaving room for. We have to try. The question is harsh but must be asked: Why save one particular subspecies of rhino? Our planet, cynics will tell you, is not a museum. We have no sacred duty to the ecological status quo. Nature is brutal. Variants come and go. We have already lost the giraffe rhinoceros and the woolly rhinoceros and more than other kinds of ancient rhinos — and we seem to be getting along just fine.

Conservation is largely sentimentality. Then, point out that nothing exists in isolation. A rhino is not just a rhino: It is a load-bearing strand in an elaborate ecological web. Just by going about its day, a rhinoceros helps keep its whole environment healthy.

Its grazing mows and plows the fields. Its daily walks clear paths through the bush, leaving hard, flat roads for other animals to follow. A rhino is not just a part of the world — it is a world. Everywhere it goes, it moves in swirling clouds of ox-peckers and egrets and guinea fowl. Humans like to pretend that we can stand apart from such elaborate interconnections, from the vast web of nonhuman life.

But we, too, are a part of that web. And sooner or later our strand will be cut. At some point, we have to talk about love. About rhinos as givers and receivers of love. It is ignored in policy debates. And yet, in the end, love is the source of all our meaningful values. Clearly, Najin and Fatu love each other. In the wild, female white rhinos tend to be social, living with their calves in groups of about a dozen.

But the girls had only each other, day after day. The caretakers, too, very obviously love the girls. And the girls, as much as rhinos can, seem to love them back. After just a couple of hours, I, too, was in love with these creatures — especially with Najin, whom I wanted to stand next to, and actually be hugging, at all times. Falling in love with the girls, up close, made me think about one of our most basic human conundrums: Love has a range.

We are built to love, and we can summon that love to do nearly impossible things — and yet that love has an outer range of maybe 30 yards. It fills the inside of our houses. It washes over our families and our pets. It extends, as we walk, to the town around us. But it cannot leap, with any of the necessary intensity, across city limits or state lines or oceans. It cannot leap, except abstractly, with great effort, to distant people in need, or to strange, threatened animals.

We love, really love, what is near us. What we have touched. What loves us back. Those limitations are a problem when it comes to a crisis like mass extinction. All 7. Humanity at large will never truly love them. And so we will never act, collectively, with the urgency that befits true love — the only kind of urgency that might work. There are about 1, left. What about the black-footed ferret, sneaky little fur-tube of the Great Plains?

There are fewer than left in the wild. The humphead wrasse, the giant panda, the dugong, the hawksbill turtle, the polar bear, the Cross River gorilla?

The monarch butterfly? We have to proceed, somehow, as if our love extended to creatures and places it could extend to but does not. We need to fit humanity with some kind of prosthetic love extensions. The girls do not exist for us. They are not symbols or oracles.

They are not there to answer our existential questions or to help us save the world. They are something better and simpler. The population of Gondas in Nepal was estimated at ca. Up to 6 in the Chitwan Valley. The area was heavily protected by the then-Rana rulers for hunting the game. Five endangered black rhinos from the European Zoo are taking an or historical step.

As a result of conservation efforts, the black rhino population is relentlessly recovering, and Kenya now has more than black rhinoceros. Wildlife in Uganda included both black and white rhinoceros. By the s, the population of Gonds in Uganda was below Eastern Blacks.

Namibian rhinoceros and elephant populations have more than doubled and are all thanks to a well-managed natural resource. Today all the southern white rhinoceros in the world are finally derived from these rhinoceros. Beginning 28 Africa has population in Africa. South Africa has saved 18, white rhinoceros. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Skip to content Search for:. Last Updated On: May 9, Rhino is commonly seen as an abbreviation of rhinoceros, one of the five existing species of survivors. Time is running out — Can we save the Rhino?

Sadly, there are fewer than 50 Javan rhinos in the wild, and none in zoos. The Sumatran rhinoceros is the smallest of the rhinos and is the only rhino covered with a coat of shaggy hair. The Sumatran rhino is considered to be the most primitive, being closely related to the long-extinct wooly rhino. Like the Javan rhino, it is critically endangered, with probably fewer than 80 individuals left in the world.

Once found from the Himalayan foothills to Vietnam, it survives today in a few scattered populations in what little forest habitat is left on the island of Sumatra.

There has been little success in breeding Sumatran rhinos in zoos. Dining all day: All rhinos are herbivores, spending the majority of the morning, late afternoon, and nighttime eating grasses or leaves, depending on the species.

During the hottest part of the day, they rest. Their horns are used to dig up roots and break branches for better access to food. Rhinos have an interesting social system.

The dominant male, or bull, occupies a small, exclusive territory, allowing only one or two subordinate males to share the territory with him. Neighboring dominant bulls show unusual respect for the territory boundaries and rarely trespass except to get water during the dry season. Dominant bulls invest a great deal of time and energy just patrolling their territory, marking it with urine and defecating in dung heaps that serve as a community bulletin board.

Subordinate bulls put little effort into such communication with scent, always deferring to the dominant bull when they meet up.

The three Asian rhinos have tusks, and they use these enlarged incisors rather than their stubby horns when fighting or defending their territory. Greater one-horned rhino bulls develop longer tusks than the females. A bull may confront a rival by opening his mouth to show off his tusks. The two African rhinos lack these tusks and so use their horns for defense or fights. Fights among rhinos can sometimes led to death; 50 percent of black rhino bulls and 30 percent of females die from wounds received during a fight.

No other mammal has such a high death rate from this type of combat. Females are not territorial and move through large home ranges that overlap with many other females. Adult white rhino females are more social than black rhinos and often stay in small groups of up to a dozen or so that include calves and subadults.

He may rest his chin on her rump to test whether she will tolerate a mating. If successful, a calf is born 15 to 16 months later. Although wobbly at first, the newborn is soon able to stand on its feet and starts to nurse two to three hours after birth. The mother guards her calf carefully from predators such as large cats, hyenas, and crocodiles, as well as from adult male rhinos. Calves and subadults often play, practicing their sparring and head-tossing techniques.

A rhino mother may tend to her calf for up to four years unless she has another baby, in which case she pushes her older calf into independence to make way for the new arrival. The exception is the Sumatran rhino: calves stay with the mother for two to three years, but it may be two years more before she gives birth again.

The San Diego Zoo's first rhinoceros arrived in —a two-year-old black rhino calf from Kenya. Named Sally, she was an immediate hit with zoogoers. However, despite two mates, she failed to breed. He is a good example of what one person can do to make a difference! Greater one-horned rhinos first came to the Zoo in , and they were among the original wildlife at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park when it opened to the public in Just three years later, the Park welcomed its first greater one-horned rhino calf and has had breeding success ever since.

As of July , a total of 73 greater one-horned rhinos have been born at the Safari Park. Since then, more than southern white rhinos have been born at the Safari Park. Most of these have moved on to live in other facilities around the world.

Today, the San Diego Zoo Safari Park has the largest crash of rhinos and the most successful managed-care breeding program for rhinos anywhere in the world. The Safari Park holds the record for the most rhinos born in a zoo: from 3 species, including 5 generations of black rhinos and 7 generations of greater one-horned rhinos.

One of our youngest calves is a fifth-generation greater one-horned rhino, the first such birth in the world! For centuries, the rhino existed largely unchallenged. But the advent of high-powered weapons brought a new and deadly enemy: humans.