Innocuous lumbering giants made vulnerable by their size and an absurd human obsession with their keratinous horns, the very future of the planet’s rhinos hangs very much in the balance. The conservation world is almost saturated with the tragic reality that ego and greed have desecrated the populations of one of the world’s most iconic animals. When, eventually, my thoughts had cleared (and my knees had stopped shaking), I was filled with a profound sense of respect for the wild, her creatures and the little black rhino cow, later known as Elizabeth, so determined to assert herself. Certainly, more than I was capable of at that moment. She whirled around in a cloud of dust less than two metres from us, turning in an impossibly tight circle, and trotting off with a surprising amount of dignity. One cliché did hold, however, and time seemed to slow as I become aware of every huff of her breath and the movement of her feet and, at what seemed like the last second, the way she dropped her head…Īnd then it was over. If clichés are to be believed, my life should then have flashed before my eyes, but I felt only an unreasonable bitterness directed at the useless bushwillow. Then suddenly she was charging, closing the gap at an alarming pace. ![]() A quick assessment of my immediate surroundings showed a raisin bush to my left and a bushwillow sapling the width of my wrist to my right. She took one step in our direction, then another. Aided by an exceptional sense of smell and hearing, she was no longer confused, and her head was raised as she stared directly at us. While we were dawdling, she had circled to get a better measure of the situation and had clearly decided that we were unequivocally not to be trusted. We changed our trajectory to avoid her and set about circling back.Īs we stopped to record the coordinates of the next midden, she reappeared suddenly, again only 50m away but this time downwind of us. She stared myopically at the three guides standing upwind of her for a second or two before wheeling around and trotting off in the opposite direction, tailed curled characteristically over her back. I was crouched over a midden examining the freshness of the dung (very) when a soft snort drew our attention to the black rhino cow standing in a thicket some 50m away. It started as a relatively innocuous morning spent recording midden positions for a research project, barely 200 metres from our vehicle.
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