AEFF Executive Director, Ian Saunders, reports from the field on a dramatic recent filming operation...
Recently Simon and I were in the field filming an historic event in wildlife conservation here in Kenya.
We were documenting the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) / Zoological Society of London joint operation to capture 10 Black Rhino from the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary in Tsavo West National Park and release them outside of the sanctuary in an area that has not seen free ranging rhino for decades.
Such an operation involves first finding a rhino in the thick bush of the 70 square kilometre fenced sanctuary. Then a KWS vet has to dart the rhino from a low flying helicopter, a feat in itself!
When the rhino has been darted and finally goes down – usually in impenetrable bush – the ground team race forward to carry out a series of medical tests and to monitor the animal during its period of sedation.
The teams of vets have to work fast; the longer the rhino is under sedation, the more risk to the animal there is. The primary horn is sawed off at the tip with a chain saw and two holes are drilled into the horn into which a small radio transmitter is inserted. This is essential for the security and the monitoring of the rhino when it is released into the free ranging area.
The rhino is then partially revived and pushed and pulled into a purpose built crate:
A large flatbed truck with a 12 tonne crane then comes crashing through the bush to pick up the crate and take it to the release site where the rhino finally runs free.
In AEFF’s film “Black Rhino: On the Brink” we showed how the Black Rhino were slowly coming back from the edge of extinction and gaining in number.
Tsavo East and West combined used to have about 7000 rhinos only 35 years ago. This extensive area of over 20,000sq km has some of the best black rhino habitat in the country and is crucial for meeting Kenya’s long term conservation target of 2000 rhinos.
This figure will still be a long way from the former population of 20,000, which plummeted to a paltry 350 animals in just two decades. This was during the poaching crisis of the 1980s when rhinos were killed en masse for their horn. This poaching inferno was fanned by the demand for rhino horn in Asia and the Middle East for use in traditional medicine and for ceremonial daggers. After the formation of the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1989, the remaining rhinos were put into fenced sanctuaries and accorded 24 hour armed protection. Ngulia is one of the prime government-run rhino sanctuaries in Kenya.
The rhino population has been improving steadily since then and now some 500 black rhinos are estimated to live in Kenya. This recent “free” release into the open is therefore an attempt to enable the rhinos to breed naturally again in the land that they once roamed free and in abundance. Should the release be successful, the project partnership composed of the Kenya Wildlife Service and the Zoological Society of London hope they can replicate it in Tanzania and Uganda.
AEFF was again given permission to film this dramatic process. To get the right shots we had to be right there alongside the team both working on the ground and in the air. One minute we were sitting squashed behind the KWS vet in the helicopter filming the crucial moment when the dart leaves the gun and hits the rhino, the next we were running and filming as we crashed through the bush with the lead elements of the ground team to get to the downed rhino. In many cases, the first people to reach the rhino found it still standing but very drowsy, the tranquilizer not yet having taken full effect. On more than one occasion the rhino was simply pushed to the ground by the first people to reach it!
After many years working alongside the KWS Animal Translocation Unit, we have become uniquely experienced at being able to document, in depth, the dramatic and action packed capture and translocation operations of not only rhino but the many other species that are relocated during wildlife re-stocking operations in Kenya. Watch this space for more action in the future…
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Monday, January 19, 2009 at 12:20PM 
