Snapshot Rhinos
One of the animals that continue to be a rarity on snapshot Serengeti is the rhino. We have had a handful of capture events over the years.
There are two species of rhino found in Africa; the white or square lipped and the black or hook lipped. The Serengeti is home to the latter. It is a large bulky mammal and as such many a hopeful #Rhino has turned out to be a blurry image of an elephant or buffalo. Things can get confusing with some of the images but isn’t that half the challenge trying to guess those indescribable blobs? Surely it wouldn’t be the same if everything was easy to id?
Anyway back to Serengeti rhinos.
Just 50 years ago between 500 and 700 Eastern Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis michaeli) roamed the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem but during the seventies the population was decimated by poaching to around 10 or so individuals.
A huge effort is being made by various conservation and government bodies with enormous donations by private individuals to save the population from total extinction. Notably a remnant population in the park was highly protected and slowly, over the next few decades the population made some recovery. In 2010 it was decided that the Serengeti area was being protected well enough to try and bolster the resident rhinos with new genetic stock. It just so happened that a private owner in South Africa had a breeding herd of Eastern black rhino that had been part of the attempt to safe guard the subspecies back in the 60’s, these animals had originated from Kenya. With strict controls by IUCN officials it was deemed these animals were of the right genetic stock to be reintroduced to the Serengeti.
The plan was to translocate 32 rhinos over the next few years and release them in a new site close enough to allow some overlap with the resident 30 or so rhino. Unfortunately the project has been affected by the recent escalation in rhino poaching and it is difficult to find how many rhino have been successfully translocated to date let alone the current Serengeti total population but you can bet it is still small. The IUCN red data list states Tanzania as having 88 Eastern Black Rhino in 2011.
If you are lucky enough to stumble across a rhino capture on Snapshot Serengeti you should definitely celebrate … and don’t forget to # it.
Snapshot Serengeti 