‘An overwhelmingly emotional experience’ — the rewilding of 120 rhinos

The team prepares for a day of capture in the African Parks’ Rhino Rewild Initiative. (Photo: Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation)

By Kristin Engel

24 Jul 2024

During a Daily Maverick webinar, experts explain how they’re conducting one of the largest rewilding projects in Africa and how the data collected can advance rhino conservation globally.

In a Daily Maverick webinar on Wednesday, experts joined award-winning Our Burning Planet journalist Julia Evans for a glimpse into one of the largest rewilding projects on the continent. The first stage involved the successful translocation of 120 southern white rhinos to private reserves along the Kruger National Park’s western boundary — the first reintroduction of rhinos there in about 50 years.

The initiative is part of African Parks’ Rhino Rewild to relocate 2,000 southern white rhinos into secure protected areas in Africa over 10 years.

In the webinar, Sharon Haussmann, the CEO of the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation (GKEPF), reflected on the last of the 120 rhinos being safely transferred to private parks.

“At that stage, we’d almost run out of emotions because we had been busy with it for about five weeks. It is an overwhelmingly emotional experience. It takes a huge amount of responsibility.”

GKEPF was the coordinating body and secured the funding for the translocation. The foundation’s members, private reserves on the western boundary of Kruger, were the recipients of the rhinos.

Read more: ‘Great day’ for conservation as rhinos reach safe haven in Greater Kruger as part of rewilding project

Donovan Jooste, a project manager at Rhino Rewild, said that in September 2023 African Parks bought 2,000 southern white rhinos from John Hume, the previous owner of the world’s largest captive rhino breeding operation.

They hoped to rewild them all to well-managed and secure protected areas.

Read more: ‘Benefits so clearly outweigh the risks’: 120 rhino successfully translocated into Greater Kruger system

rewilding rhinos Sharon Haussman, CEO of the Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation, and the team stabilise a rhino after it has been sedated during the African Parks’ Rhino Rewild Initiative. (Photo: Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation)

“This is a 10-year initiative, in principle, where we aim to rewild these rhinos over the next 10 years in safe and well-managed protected areas — not only within South Africa but across the continent. This is to allow these rhinos to live up to their ecological values, as well as form part of creating an ecosystem throughout the continent,” said Jooste.

Rhinos return home

Many of the rhinos originally came from Kruger, conservation economist Michael ’t Sas-Rolfes said in the webinar.

“They were bought from Kruger. So they’re actually returning home. They’re actually returning, more or less, to their home environment after spending some time under a high-security operation where they were physically protected,” he said.

The rhinos were bought from Kruger when there was a surge in poaching from 2008 onwards.

“It remains an unfortunate fact of life that you will be really hard-pressed to find wild rhinos anywhere in Africa now, that don’t have some heavily armed guards that aren’t under surveillance with hi-tech solutions to protect them.

“The idea of rhinos being just completely wild and free and unmonitored and unprotected is a fantasy,” said ’t Sas-Rolfes.

The discussion now, he said, was about their safety.

“How is the relationship with local communities that live close to those protected areas? How large are those communities? How impoverished are they? How good is their relationship with the protected area managers? And with the protected areas themselves, how good are their anti-poaching operations?

“What we really want to see are these wild populations of rhinos performing an ecologically functional role, being subjected to regular evolutionary processes, and as such, it’s a far more desirable situation to have them in this situation than under the intensive, high-secure operation that they were in,” said ’t Sas-Rolfes.

GKEPF has formed a partnership with nine private reserves, one provincial park and one national park to service the protection needs of the western and eastern buffers of the Kruger National Park (KNP) and the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier National Park.

Poaching

The translocation comes at a time when effective security and anti-poaching measures have caused poaching rates within GKEPF reserves to significantly decline.

In 2016, the private reserves on the western boundary of Kruger lost 72 rhinos to poachers. So far this year, Haussmann said, they had lost just one.

“Timbavati [Private Nature Reserve] has not had significant losses in the last three years at all. None of the private reserves have, and that is an absolute credit to these private reserves which have become so resilient and really have pioneered incredible responses to the poaching threat,” she said.

rewilding rhinos The team prepares for a day of capture in the African Parks’ Rhino Rewild Initiative. (Photo: Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation)

“There’s a lot of work being done into the driving factors of corruption that leads to poaching in the area. There’s also continuous relationship building with our community partners, etc. These managers and these reserves were overwhelmingly optimistic that they could give these rhinos a good chance.

“Kruger National Park, in its own right, is making huge strides in the right direction in terms of combating poaching in Kruger… We know the high-risk areas. These rhinos are intensely monitored. We have committed to a very intensive monitoring period to inform us for future projects. Each and every rhino is being tracked for observations.

“The last release was just over a month ago. We’ve had a successful birth of a pregnant cow that was translocated, a very healthy cow and baby. There are challenges … we have had bull fights, but these are natural occurrences.”

The integration is happening at a speed the teams did not expect.

“We’ve had many counts of the African Parks rhinos integrating with the existing population. We’ve had rhinos, cows confirmed that came from specific private reserves, were offloaded in a different private reserve and made their way back to the original home territory, which is fascinating.

“The amount of data that we are collecting and the amount of information that we are collecting could advance rhino conservation globally,” she said. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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