Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  Thought you might like to see a picture of a giraffe.

  But we left feeling surprisingly positive. Garamba was better protected than it had been in a long time. During our visit, there were 246 trained staff, with six vehicles, permanent guard posts throughout the park, mobile patrols all in contact with one another by field radio, and a couple of light aircraft.

  Against all the odds, for the next twenty years the dedicated team ran an extremely successful project and countered much of the trouble. At one point, the northern white rhino population actually doubled in size. But protecting wildlife on a battlefield was unimaginably tough. Rangers were even forced to patrol with hand grenades and rocket launchers (captured from the poachers) as well as their own AK47s.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I think Douglas and I were being naïve in our optimism. Given Garamba’s unhappy and chequered history, slap-bang in the middle of a lawless and relentless war zone with frequent armed conflict, we should have suspected trouble ahead.

  Indeed, there was trouble ahead. Lots of it.

  By the time Stephen and I were travelling in Africa, the park was surrounded by armed refugees, guerrillas from Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army, Congolese rebels from the National Congress for the Defence of the People, military camps belonging to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, a motley collection of mercenaries, undisciplined and chronically underfunded Congolese army troops, and horse-riding Muharaleen elephant poachers. And that’s not including all the UN troops looking for pretty much everyone else. Many of these people were actually hiding in the park itself.

  The last time northern white rhinos had been seen alive was during an aerial survey of Garamba in March 2006, when two adult males, a single adult female and a young animal of indeterminate sex were spotted, albeit briefly. As far as anyone could tell, there were just four left.

  We had absolutely no doubt that this trip really would be our last chance to see what was probably the most critically endangered animal in the world.

  Once upon a time, a few million years ago, there was a rhino that split in two. It didn’t split like an amoeba, of course, literally tearing itself in half and wandering off in two different directions. It split in two in the evolutionary sense.

  The two rhinos eventually grew into separate subspecies. One became the northern white rhino (speak quickly and you’ll say ‘northern right wino’ – at least you will now that I’ve pointed it out) and the other became the southern white rhino.

  To the untutored eye (and, to be perfectly frank, to the tutored eye as well) the two subspecies look identical. Stand a northern white rhino next to a southern white rhino and most people would be hard-pushed to tell them apart. Read the scientific literature and you’ll discover that the northern white tends to hold its head a little higher than its southern counterpart, and its body proportions are slightly different, but that’s just splitting hairs.

  ‘The northern white rhino is basically the southern white rhino with a different accent,’ as Stephen put it. True, but it’s a little more than that – their genetic differences are sufficiently great for them to be considered biologically separate.

  Millions of people have died in the DRC, and many more have been displaced from their homes.

  One thing you’ll notice about both white rhinos is that they’re not actually white. A rhino will often be roughly the same colour as the local soil (it rolls around in it a lot), but even if you were to put one through a car wash it still wouldn’t be white. It wouldn’t even be stone white, or champagne white, or whatever else paint manufacturers call every possible shade of off-white. It’s more of a dull grey-brown colour.

  Despite what you might think, this isn’t because zoologists are either colour-blind or stupid. It’s because they are illiterate. It comes from a mistranslation of the Dutch word ‘wijde’, which means ‘wide’ and refers to the rhino’s mouth. This was misread as the Afrikaans word ‘wit’, which means ‘white’. And so the wide-mouthed rhino became the white rhino.

  No one has a clue if this is actually true or not, incidentally, but it’s a good story and gets told around campfires the length and breadth of Africa almost every night.

  What we do know is that the white rhino’s mouth is, indeed, wide. It is designed for grazing, for eating short grass, whereas its African cousin, the black rhino, has a prehensile upper lip designed for browsing. The white rhino is like a lawnmower, the black rhino is like a pair of secateurs, and their lips are the best way to tell them apart.

  Now, the white rhino is a bit of a paradox, because it is both the rarest and the commonest of all the world’s rhinos. The two subspecies have had very different fortunes. The northerner set up home in the crossfire of a war zone – giving some credibility to the saying ‘It’s grim up north’ – while the southerner settled for a relatively easier life hiding from hunters and poachers, rather than dodging rebels’ bullets.

  When the southern white rhino was first described by western scientists, in 1817, it was incredibly common. Lots of explorers and travellers wandering around Africa at the time were so impressed by its commonness they made a point of writing about it. But the good times came to an abrupt end pretty quickly. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, were killed by sports hunters, poachers and even the early explorers themselves. By the 1880s, conservationists feared the worst.

  But a tiny population survived by hiding in a remote corner of Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve, which is north of Durban in South Africa. All the stops were pulled out to protect these last few survivors – perhaps a couple of dozen animals altogether – and the southern white rhino became one of the greatest conservation success stories of all time.

  There are now more than 17,480 southern whites in the wild in Africa, and another 750 or so in captivity around the world. This is nowhere near as many as there once were, of course, but at least now they are out of immediate danger. It just shows what can be achieved with a good plan, political will, dedicated people on the ground, and plenty of money.

  But there is a slight catch. Part of the conservation plan includes trophy hunting. Under government licence, hunters have been allowed to shoot a small number of elderly male rhinos – for a hefty price – every year since the late 1960s.

  One thing you’ll notice about both the northern white rhino (above) and the southern white rhino (below) is that they’re not actually white. They still wouldn’t be white even if you put them through a car wash.

  Could you imagine killing a southern white rhino for fun? Lots of people do.

  It sounds ridiculous, shooting an animal you are trying to protect, but there’s no denying that it has worked. By raising desperately needed funds and giving local communities (and landowners – many of the rhinos are on private land) an incentive to look after them, trophy hunting has played an important role in southern white rhino conservation.

  Never in a million years could I shoot a rhino myself – or begin to understand the mentality of the people who do. I couldn’t even wring the neck of a dying, one-legged chicken. But I try to be realistic and, begrudgingly, I do agree with most conservation groups that trophy hunting has been a necessary evil in saving the southern white rhino from extinction (assuming, of course, that the hunting is properly managed, the population is large enough and the profits are injected back into conservation efforts).

  Killing individual animals for the greater good of the species is a tough call, but in some cases there is no alternative. Unfortunately, making wildlife pay for itself is sometimes the only way to make most people consider it worth saving.

  Stephen arrived in Africa in customary style. When his plane came in to land at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, as soon as the wheels hit the ground the brakes screeched and he was thrown forward into the headrest of the seat in front (actually, I’m probably exaggerating – in First Class, apparently, the headrest of the seat in front would have been too far away for him to make physical contact).

  Anyway,
his plane made a squealing, swervy landing.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said the pilot, after he’d wrestled back control of his Boeing 777. ‘There was an aardvark on the runway and I didn’t want to hurt it.’

  There is something rather special about stepping out of a plane onto African soil. Anyone who has done it will know what I mean. There is a particular smell, a sense of anticipation and an overwhelming feeling of space. Douglas Adams described his first impression perfectly: ‘The sky over Kenya is simply much bigger than it is anywhere else.’

  We were in East Africa to visit Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a non-profit rhino sanctuary in the shadow of Mount Kenya and a few hours’ drive from Nairobi. The rhinos in this 36,500-hectare (90,000-acre) fenced enclosure are protected round-the-clock. Anti-poaching patrols aim to see each individual (there were 78 black rhinos and nine white rhinos at the time of our visit) at least once every four or five days. If one goes missing, reinforcements – more rangers, a surveillance aircraft and even two bloodhounds – are brought in to step up the search until the disappearing perissodactyl is found.

  More importantly, Ol Pej, as it’s called by the locals, had been preparing itself for a small party of northern white rhinos. The original plan was to evacuate the last survivors from the war zone in Garamba National Park and put them into this rhino health farm for safe-keeping. The plan has since changed, but more of that later.

  First we had an appointment to see a southern white rhino, to get Stephen in the mood.

  The southern white rhino wouldn’t look out of place wandering alongside a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger.

  With the help of Batian Craig, the Wildlife and Security Manager, we found one fairly quickly. We stopped the car and cut the engine to look at it properly through binoculars. It was busy feeding and had its back to us. It seemed a little incongruous for such a monstrously huge animal to be doing such a gentle activity as grazing, rather like watching a road digger doing a bit of weeding.

  Very slowly, Batian opened the driver’s door.

  ‘We’re not going to get out, are we?’ asked Stephen, looking a little alarmed. ‘Aren’t there lots of lions here, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Batian, starting to whisper. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about.’

  Anyone can walk in lion country, of course, but the professionals do it without being eaten. I remember going on a survival course in South Africa many years ago, and the game ranger in charge gave us this nugget of advice: ‘If we stumble upon a lion,’ he said, ‘we’ll get out of the area by moving slowly backwards. We will not run. If we run, we have a hundred per cent chance of being killed.’

  I told Stephen, but he just glared at me.

  We slipped out of the car as quietly as possible, closing the doors without shutting them properly, and started creeping towards the rhino.

  ‘Just listen to Dixon and the other rangers,’ said Batian. ‘Do what they say. If something happens, don’t suddenly bolt or you will leave somebody in the … in the … you know what.’

  ‘It looks remarkably prehistoric,’ whispered Stephen, who was suddenly rising to the occasion. ‘It wouldn’t look out of place wandering alongside a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger.’

  We crept forward, very quietly, very slowly, constantly stopping, crouching and shifting our position. Gently cropping the grass, the rhino seemed to be completely undisturbed by our approach. But then it stopped eating and looked up. We froze. It started to chew a little more thoughtfully (it was hard to tell if it was regarding us with grave suspicion or without a care in the world) and then resumed the eating position.

  ‘This is insanity,’ said Stephen. ‘I’ve been brought up all my life to believe that rhinos are amongst the most dangerous and bad-tempered animals on the face of the earth and here we are closer to one than I’d normally get to a German Shepherd.’

  Nervously, we set off again. At last we made it to a small clump of trees about 20 metres (66 feet) away and watched quietly from there. The rhino was so big it was like stalking a Cherokee Jeep.

  The rhino looked up again. This time it lifted its head, clearly sniffing the air. Its tubular ears swivelled, like mini parabolic reflectors, trying to pick up the slightest sound. We hardly dared to breathe. Rhinos have poor eyesight, but this one was definitely looking at us with one eye, and then swung its head to the side to look at us with the other.

  We stepped out from behind the clump.

  ‘Should we be going any closer?’ asked Stephen.

  The rhino turned and walked straight towards us.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Stephen. ‘It’s coming.’

  The ranger signalled that it was okay and stood in front of us like a Secret Service bodyguard diving in front of the President to take the full force of an assassin’s bullet.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Stephen again, as the rhino came nearly to within touching distance. ‘Surely, this isn’t right?’

  I heard chuckling and turned around to see Dixon and the other rangers doubled-up with laughter.

  ‘Good grief!’ chuckled Stephen. ‘You swines!’

  We’d been tricked. It turned out to be a bottle-fed, hand-reared rhino, called Max. The three-and-a-half-year-old male southern white must have been the tamest rhino in Africa.

  ‘That was a complete con,’ said Stephen. ‘There we were, tiptoeing around, the most frightened people in Africa, and all the time it was tamer than a labrador!’

  We patted Max on the head, introduced ourselves, and took some photographs. A storm was gathering and the sky was a threatening, dark blue. A rainbow appeared above Max’s head. It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity.

  So there I was, lying on the ground no more than 3 metres (10 feet) away from a two-tonne southern white rhino, photographing it with a wide-angle lens, when my mobile phone rang (reception in much of the developing world is considerably better than, for example, along the M4 into London).

  It was the moment I’d been waiting for and dreaming about for years. I’d imagined all the possible scenarios:

  ‘Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m kayaking with a humpback whale … Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m getting ready to snorkel with a whale shark … Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m stalking an Alaskan brown bear … Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m climbing a Scot’s pine to look inside an eagle’s nest’… etc.

  Mark with several tonnes of the tamest rhino in Africa.

  Anyway, it actually happened. The phone rang. Max snapped to attention and listened intently to my ringtone (which happened to be the vocalisations of a pod of killer whales in British Columbia – something he probably hadn’t heard many times before). He was still watching me suspiciously as I answered the call.

  A baboon not showing its bottom.

  ‘Hello, I can’t talk right now, I’m lying on the ground next to a two-tonne rhino.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said John, a globe-trotting friend from the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol. ‘I just wondered if you can remember the name of that Asian restaurant we went to in Clifton the other day.’

  We said goodbye to Max, walked back to the Land Rover without being eaten by lions, and headed out across the savannah towards a specially built enclosure called a boma.

  And here’s a picture of a tree-climbing lion.

  Going on safari with Stephen is like going to the Grand Prix with Murray Walker. He gives a running commentary.

  We drove past some Grant’s gazelles (‘or are they Thompson’s gazelles?’ asked Stephen), past some giraffes (‘with their heads in the clouds’), past some warthogs (‘I like warthogs’), past an enormous troop of baboons (‘baboons have blue bottoms, you know’) and past an ostrich (‘with knobbly knees like that I’m not surprised they bury their heads in the sand’).

  And so the commentary continued until we arrived at the boma.

  We were with a lady who has done more for the last surviving northern white rhinos than anyone else
on the planet. I first met Kes Hillman-Smith when Douglas and I visited Garamba National Park in 1989. Douglas described her at the time as: ‘a formidable woman, who looks as if she has just walked off the screen of a slightly naughty adventure movie.’ Twenty years later, she hadn’t changed a bit.

  Kes used to live with her husband, Fraser, and their two young children, in a house they built themselves on the banks of the Garamba River. The house was largely open to the elements – when it rained they simply lowered tarpaulins over the spaces where windows weren’t. It was regularly full of animals, including a young hippo that used to chew on the pot plants in the living room, rats that used to eat the soap in the bathroom and termites that were gradually nibbling away at the support poles of the entire house. The garden was a veritable menagerie – having survived all the snakes and elephants, their pet dog was eventually eaten by a crocodile.

  I asked Kes if her children were still alive.

  ‘Yes, of course they are!’ she said, laughing. ‘They still love the bush. One is working in northern Kenya and the other is a pilot flying for safari lodges.’

  Kes and the family were forced to leave their home in Garamba, because of all the troubles. It was getting too dangerous even for them. They hadn’t been back since 2006.

  We walked around the boma and there, standing on its own in one corner, was a rhino. It was listening to the radio.

  ‘That’s Barack,’ said Kes.

  ‘You’re kidding! Barack?’ asked Stephen, to confirm what he thought he’d just heard. He had been following the US Presidential elections very closely during our travels in Kenya.