Return Of The Rhinos

For two years, Foreign Correspondent has been tracking an incredible wildlife success story at a time when the threats are growing and the extinction crisis is deepening. We are, at the moment, winning the war against poaching. I’m proud because I’m doing a good job for the country. Here in Zimbabwe, conservationists and wildlife warriors have done something extraordinary. The endangered rhino is back from the brink. Now it’s about spreading their success beyond our borders.

I’m on my way to the Mullan Way Trust. It’s a not-for-profit, private wildlife reserve, teeming with animals and one of the greatest concentrations of rhinos in Africa. I was born in Zimbabwe and I grew up in Australia, and it is such a pleasure to be back in my homeland. So many familiar sights and sounds, and even smells.

My guide is Sarah Clegg, one of Mulla Long’s resident ecologists. We’ve got a group of five. Sarah keeps track of the black and white rhino populations here. The body condition is good. It’s good. Yeah. Trophy hunters in the 19th century decimated Southern Africa’s rhino numbers. Waves of poaching over the past four decades almost wiped them out again. It’s a constant threat. The problem lies in the fact that the value of the horn is so much more than the value of the living animal with its horn on. Extinction is not theoretical. It’s real. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the near extinction of the northern white rhino with only two females left, no males left. And I think it’s a disgrace that this can happen. We need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Today, Mulla Longwe is one of the most successful rhino conservation projects in Africa. This is a special sighting. She’s one of our first rhino. She’s had about 10 calves here. Ani is a 36-year-old black rhino. It’s always wonderful. It’s always exciting, especially when they give you a bit of a charge like that. In 1998, Mulla Longwe started with 28 black and 28 white rhinos. Now hundreds of rhinos roam freely here. Happy animals can produce more babies that can grow populations, and that’s what we need for rhinos.

It’s day one of Rhino Ops, a week-long mission to gather vital data on the herd. Every year, at least twice a year, we select rhino that are about to leave their mother so that we can mark them in a way that we’ll be able to identify them for the rest of their lives. The team is searching for a black rhino cow named Gani and her most recent calf, who is thought to be 17 months old. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t touch these animals, but because of the challenges we have nowadays with poaching and with the reduction in habitat, the more that we know about these animals, the better we are able to protect them.

The calf is darted with an immobilizing drug and will soon drop to the ground. The team must work fast. The drug can suppress the respiratory system, so the calf is given oxygen. A unique identifying pattern is carefully cut into the calf’s ears, a process known as notching. This one is 17 months, but the horn was longer. It was 19 and a half. Is the mother of this calf roaming around here somewhere? Yeah. So mothers don’t go far. You see them. Gang’s calf is almost free to go. First, she’s injected with a drug to reverse the sedative. You need to be up in the vehicle because they’ve got a formal aggressive temperament. The black rhinos do, even a calf, even a tiny calf. Moments later, the calf comes around and heads off to find mom. Her painted ID number will wear off in a few days.

In the south of the reserve, members of an elite anti-poaching unit, the Mulla Longwe scouts, are tracking a white rhino mom and her calf. I can say maybe 90% of the Zimbabweans, they’ve never seen a rhino. They just see it on television. Sergeant Patrick Manono is in the lead. Most of the people outside, when they see a rhino, they see money, like, “Hey, someone has dropped the money on the ground.” Everyone needs to know these animals are not for being poached and making money through them. Armed criminal gangs run highly organized poaching operations. Poachers have breached the Mulla Longwe boundary 10 times and killed three rhinos. A poacher is a dangerous human being, for they kill rhinos every day. They say war because if they come in, they’ll be bringing war to us. To be a scout, you are somebody who is patriotic, someone who is taking care of the community, someone who is proud of what he is doing. I didn’t think that I would end up being someone like this.

Patrick and his wife Tari live at Mulla Longwe. Do you worry about Patrick because his job is dangerous? Yeah, you do. He’s like always in my prayers every day. With the hardships here, having a job, it’s quite an important thing. They are not easy to find, so once you have a job, you’re like, “Oh, thank you, Jesus.” I have a longer… might end up being eliminated before. He has got a soft spot. He tries to be a bit stubborn, but yeah, he’s got something. He’s got a very soft spot for me. You guys look happy together. Are you happy with me? You want my happiness?

Mulla Longwe scouts patrol the 500-square-kilometer reserve every day. Every rhino sighting is documented in logbooks, along with a record of each rhino’s unique ear-notch pattern. The scouts replicate the appearance of the ears on a leaf. So you’re just copying? Yes, I’ve got left and right. Perfect, yeah. Many of the men recruited to join the scouts were once subsistence poachers, hunting small animals for meat. We are coming as poachers when we are starting to eat in the ghettos, and my brother taught me how to hunt. Did you also eat the meat that you killed? Yes, we ate the meat. And why were you poaching? Why did you need to do this? Mostly the Shanghai people, they like too much to hunt. It looks like culturally.

Until what age did you grow up here? 22 years. Most of my life here. All of your childhood? Yes. An hour’s drive from Mulla is the village of Poma. It’s home to First Mae, a seven-year veteran of the scouts. Yes, we grew up in this house, in this one. Were you born in this house? Yes. And how many siblings did you have sharing the house with you? I have four, four, five with my parents also. It was difficult. Very, very difficult. Can you tell me why? Because sleeping in the house like this one in winter times, there’s no warmth inside here. It’s cold. It’s cold. Yeah. Did you and your brothers and sisters have enough to eat when you were children? Not so much.

Why did you become a Mulla Longwe scout? I did it because I wanted to feed my family.

Next door to Mulla Longwe, along the Rudi River, lies Gozo National Park. It was once home to a thriving black rhino population until poachers killed every last one. Last year, Mulla Longwe joined other wildlife reserves in a plan to return black rhinos to the national park. It is a terrible thing to have to go in and move animals around and take them away from what they’re familiar with and from who they’re familiar with. But it has become a necessity in the world we live in now. And, um, if you’re going to put an animal through that stress, your homework needs to have been done to give that population a chance that it requires.

The shelves of Mulla Longwe’s research office are stacked with logbooks dating back to 1998. When you’ve got this accumulation of decades of data, it then becomes really, really powerful. If there was one headline insight that you’ve gleaned over 20 odd years of working with rhinos, what would it be? You get to see these deep relationships that they have with other rhinos, and you realize that there’s so much more to them than just a feeding, surviving, mechanistic creature. Their relationships are complicated and obviously important for their happiness. These thousands and thousands of books full of rhino data, what you’ve extrapolated over the last 20 odd years is that rhinos need love. Exactly. Just like humans need love. Yeah, yeah. Rhinos need love and so do all animals. Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Drawing on their research, Sarah and her team carefully planned how to best relocate the black rhinos. They can’t just put any old couple together, right? So they just won’t breed unless they’re happy. It’s not just the animals that you’re sending as the group that you need to consider keeping their stability. You need to make sure that the animals you are leaving behind also maintain their social stability. Right, that you’re not creating a vacuum there or an emotional vacuum. You guys, you think I’m mad. Yeah. Well, they’re such a complex species, black rhino. They’ve got this reputation of being bad-tempered and dangerous, and they are, but I think it’s mostly that they’re just so emotional creatures. Just like in humans, a lot of the prickly people, they’re not really horrible. They’re just insecure. And you feel that way about black rhinos? I do. Yeah, I do. I think they’re misunderstood.

Par Zani Nu is a wildlife scout and tracker. She’s the one who was just in another scout, so we better not bother him too much. Me, Jason bought one of our scouts a couple of years ago. Did the scout survive? Yeah. Keep very still, you’ve got a better chance than if you move because they pick up on movement. Is this rhino going to charge Sarah? What are you going to do? So, you know, you’re going to go, go, go, go. So he was just coming up to investigate. When they get nervous, they tend to get a bit violent. So today was our lucky day. Oh, our lucky day. We didn’t feel the horn today.

In May 2021, 29 black rhinos made history when they were relocated to Gozo National Park. For the first time in 30 years, rhinos were back. It’s been a year and a half now since the rhinos were relocated. I’m very curious to see how they’ve settled in, in their new home. So I’m heading to Gozo now and with Patrick from the Mulla Longwe scouts, who’s also keen to see how they’re settling in.

The national park has its own team of rangers to find the rhinos within the 5,000-square-kilometer park. The rangers tune in to transmitters in the animals’ horns. Richard Palella learned his rhino protection skills from Patrick and the Mulla Longwe scouts. Black rhinos are notoriously shy. We are approaching the mother with a baby. What do you see? I’m seeing the baby is suckling the milk. The baby is feeding from the mother. I need to be careful because she heard something, so she’s trying to figure out what’s happening. She got wind of us or heard us and she just took off like a freight train through the bush. I did catch just the tiniest glimpse of her little calf. And what’s so exciting about that was that that’s a calf that was born here at Gozo after the translocation, which is an incredible sign that this population is settling in. They’re breeding and they’re starting to call this place home.

The calf is one of five born at Gozo since the translocation, the first rhino babies here in over 30 years. I’m happy with that. And I’ve got great hope for the Goner Reserve translocation to be an enormous success. It’s what we all aim for in our careers as conservationists. It’s a wild park. So being able to put rhino back into that park is like waking it up again.

At Langue, these local boys are part of a conservation leadership initiative called the Junior Rangers. They are coming from families, but underprivileged families. They are trying to teach people in a different way. Like it’s an awareness thing of sending a message to the community that we need. This conservation thing is very, very, very serious.

Why aren’t you running today? Because I’m getting old.

It is the last day of Rhino Ops and the team are doing a checkup on a mature rhino named Sbo. So this guy’s 17 years old. White rhino can weigh up to about two tons, his adult bulls. It’s coming up the shoulder. His extraordinary weight means the team has to move him so he can breathe more easily. One, two, keep it, keep it. Hold, done.

Patrick has brought the junior rangers to see a rhino up close. This is the first time you’ve ever been up close to a rhino. Okay. And like Patrick said, this one’s a black rhino. These are critically endangered, so there are not too many of them left because of poaching. So this is a very special opportunity. It’s important to us that you see a rhino up close because if you don’t know something, it’s very difficult to love it. And if you don’t love something, it’s very difficult to care for it. When Patrick and I are old, we won’t be able to do anything. And it’s up to you guys to look after these animals for us. And just like you, each of you have a name. So for the rhino, each rhino is given a name. Like maybe a child is being named by the parent. Girls are the ones who name, who give names to the rhinos because it’s like babies to them. This rhino is a special rhino because you came to it. So we’ve decided to give it a very special name. Patrick Chinle. We’ve decided to call it Chinle because it’s where a lot of you guys are from, the orphanage that you guys are from. We want them to prepare themselves for the future. We want them to go out there and preach the word about conservation and wildlife. We want them to be respected in the community. We want them to help us change the world into a better world.

Well, I just love, I love the wildness of the place and I love that we have the capability to look after it the best way that we can. Well, I said it’s not just about the rhino or the elephants or the lions. It’s about all the animals. It’s about the giraffe, it’s about the zebra, the crocs, the birds, the plants. Keeping them all alive and keeping them all in balance and doing what they should do naturally.