The Kingdom of Rarities (18 page)

O
N AN AUSPICIOUS DAY IN
A
PRIL
1974, circled by court astrologers, Nepal's royal family gathered for a coronation ceremony in the capital, Kathmandu. In a palace chamber, Brahmin priests wrapped Crown Prince Birendra in gauze and then enveloped him in the skin of a male greater one-horned rhinoceros. The disguised monarch-to-be entered the throne room to chanting and the burning of incense. In choreographed motions, he began shaking the rhino's meter-long penis at his kin; then he repeated the dance ritual. Witnesses were few, but the performance evidently won celestial approval. The gods were praised, the royal family duly felicitated. Birendra stepped out of the skin suit; the kingdom was his for the taking.

Among traditional cultures, many rare species are believed to bestow special powers on those who eat them or wear their body parts. The rhinoceroses fall into this category; they have intrigued humans East and West for centuries and have been the subject of mythology, awe, and terrible persecution for their horn. For the West, rhino expert and wildlife historian Kees Rookmaaker explained the origins of this allure. “The Western world became acquainted with the rhinoceros in 1515 from Albrecht Dürer's anatomically inaccurate woodcut. It was drafted from notes and a sketch of a captive greater one-horned rhinoceros brought to Portugal from India.” Because the subject was large, dangerous, and rare, the woodcut attracted wide attention; it also reawakened the legend of the unicorn.

Known to science as
Rhinoceros unicornis
, the greater one-horned rhino bears little resemblance to the magical horned horse of fairy tales. This is a mammalian titan, more tank than prancer, a massive beast covered in what resembles armor held together with welds (skin folds) and rivets (tubercles). The greater one-horned rhino stands two meters tall at the shoulder and is the fifth-largest land mammal on Earth. Its horn is not technically a horn but rather densely compacted hair fibers pressed into a pointed cone. Whatever it is called, the protrusion has been supposed to have magical properties: it has been prized as medicine to quell life-threatening fevers, rumored in Vietnam to cure cancer, and nearly everywhere erroneously believed to elevate libido. In 2012, rhino horn was worth more than its weight in gold, and its value skyrocketed to $100,000 a kilogram. For this object, rhinos have been a favorite target of poachers, even though, as one wag put it, ingesting rhino horn has the same medicinal value as gnawing one's fingernails, also made of keratin.

None of the claims hold up to scientific scrutiny, but myths linger. A most stubborn belief surrounds the value of rhino urine, known as
muth
. Drinking the foul liquid, which fetches five dollars a liter on the open market, supposedly cures asthma and tuberculosis, while applying a few drops is said to heal inner ear infections.
My elephant driver, Gyan Bahadur, and his colleagues routinely jumped off their mounts to gather up the spilled urine in a plastic bag when a rhino happened to urinate in front of them.

We've now moved from the cool jack pine forests of the northern United States to the steamy lowland jungles at the base of the Himalayas to investigate several new causes of rarity. The 14-gram Kirtland's warbler was rare because of limited breeding habitat and nesting disruption by cowbirds. But this bird can potentially nest anywhere across the jack pine belt of the northern continental United States where the trees are young and the soil is sandy. The 2,000-kilogram one-horned rhinoceros, in contrast, is much more range limited, rarely wandering farther than two kilometers from water and feeding intensively on the thin strip of wild sugarcane that borders the major rivers of lowland Nepal and northern India. The Kirtland's, like many other rarities, evolved as a fire-dependent species. The greater one-horned rhino and some other narrowrange species evolved as floodplain specialists—those that persist only close to the river's edge.

Another difference between the two habitat specialists is the level of competition with humans: agriculturalists covet the siltrich grasslands found along the riverbanks and have transformed them into the rice bowl of South Asia. In contrast, the nutrientpoor, rapidly percolating soils in the jack pine zone deter farmers from the thought of grain production. The two species lie at opposite ends of the demographic spectrum as well. A female Kirtland's typically dies by four years of age or younger, whereas a female rhino can live as long as fifty years.

The greatest differences and most important new causes of rarity to explore are human predation and breeding biology. As rare as Kirtland's warblers are, no Native American tribe ever coveted their feathers for headdresses as we saw New Guinea highlanders use bird of paradise feathers or Amerindians in Peru hunt macaws for the same purpose. Michigan homesteaders never used Kirtland's warbler meat, beaks, or claws as cures or aphrodisiacs. Poaching
was simply never an issue, in contrast with what all rhinos face from Africa to Asia. And as we shall see, the critical demographic feature that dictates recovery or doom for a rhino population depends upon females living to a ripe age and producing as many calves as possible over their long reproductive lifetimes. This overlooked population parameter—known as adult female mortality—it turns out, holds the key to understanding and restoring populations of nearly all the world's charismatic large mammals, from whales to grizzly bears to giant pandas to elephants, not just the one-horned rhino.

As we saw in the Amazon, the rarity of top predators is governed by the basic laws of thermodynamics—there simply can't be many individuals in an area that live solely on the flesh of the larger mammals. The same principle or law should not, however, affect a plant eater such as the one-horned rhino, which has a massive fermentation vat attached to its stomach to digest the superabundant elephant grasses in its range. In fact, a distant relative of the one-horned rhino was the largest land mammal that ever lived. Neither mastodon nor prehistoric elephant, the heavyweight prizewinner is the extinct giant giraffe rhinoceros, as tall as a double-decker bus and six meters long.

As a young wildlife biologist studying the one-horned rhinoceros during the reign of Birendra, the rhino king, my first goal was to explore how large body size affected the ecology and conservation of giant mammals such as the greater one-horned rhino and how it influenced their range and abundance, our conditions of rarity. A second goal, as noted in chapter 1, was to determine whether big plant-eating animals are passive participants or ecosystem engineers of consequence even when they occur in low numbers.

In Nepal in the mid-1980s, one-horned rhinos occurred only in Chitwan National Park, 145 kilometers southwest of Kathmandu, in the lowland jungles known collectively as the Terai zone. After two years of trying, my colleagues and I finally received permission then from the king of Nepal to study wild rhinos. Leading the intensive effort was a group of park staff members, Smithsonian Institution
biologists, trackers, and elephant drivers. The plan to save these rhinos included catching them and attaching radio transmitters so we could monitor their movements. The project was spearheaded by my collaborator, Hemanta Mishra, at the time Nepal's leading wildlife biologist and a close adviser to the king.

Map of Nepal and neighboring regions

The insights into large-mammal biology in general and rhinoceros ecology in particular keep coming. Today, more than twenty-five years later, we know a lot more about this extraordinary animal and what it has to offer us in understanding the causes and consequences of rarity. But it all began with trying to catch the first one.

On a fog-laden morning in November 1986, Vishnu Bahadur Lama, our chief tracker, was out on elephant-back searching for a male rhino. Instead, he came upon a mother rhinoceros and her calf drifting along the riverbank. Vishnu motioned for the driver to
push their elephant onward to find the male. On a high point along the riverbank, Vishnu stood up on the elephant's back for a better view. Game trackers out at sunrise heed the words of old-timers:
read the grass
. He scanned for a hole in the wild cane, for hidden in the gaps might be a sleeping male. Another tip:
watch for mynas
. The gregarious tickbirds move among sleeping rhinos to feast on skin pests. Vishnu strained to see a few black smudges rising up from the tall grass.

The rest of us hunched over a glowing fire, waiting for Vishnu's return. Our game trackers chatted as they took their continental breakfast of tea and biscuits. A short, bowlegged man poured steaming cups of Darjeeling thickened with sugar and water-buffalo milk. There was no rush; by nine o'clock, the lid of fog covering the Chitwan Valley would have burned off and the sun would peek through the silk cotton trees. Then the hunt would begin. Gyan Bahadur, an elephant driver for more than thirty years, was the group's resident sage, or at least he thought so. Gyan and his crew would soon be urging their powerful charges through the grass toward our quarry. Other dangers lurked in this jungle, though. One could surprise a tiger, a sloth bear, or even a king cobra, whose venomous bite could topple an elephant. Nearby, young men hustled to feed the research vehicles. They hauled piles of wild sugarcane and tree branches before a row of hungry elephants, which delicately selected choice bits of vegetation with their trunks and began a noisy repast: chewing, lip smacking, more chewing, and prolonged bouts of flatulence.

The banter halted when Vishnu and his mount hustled into camp. “A big male. With a horn like this big!” Vishnu spread his hands even wider than his grin. “He is the one.” In seemingly one movement, he hopped down from the elephant, dropped to his haunches, and spread his palms over the fire. Gyan handed him a steaming mug. Some of the trackers were eager to start while the air was cool; an early capture would reduce the risk of an animal overheating in the noonday sun.

Finally, everyone was ready. Vishnu took a shortcut to the saddle: he grabbed the tips of his elephant's ears and held on while the beast offered Vishnu her trunk to use as an escalator and in one smooth motion lifted him to the top of her head. He scrambled around the driver and found a space on the broad saddle next to Sunder Shrestha, the veterinarian in charge.

Vishnu had begun his career here as a teenager, hauling water and chopping firewood. After a few years, Hemanta had made him a
shikari
, or tracker. Over time, he and other young men from his mountain village had become Nepal's best wildlife technicians. Catching, radio-collaring, and monitoring elephants, leopards, sloth bears, forest deer, and tigers—man-eaters or more orthodox deer eaters—were all in a day's work for these enthusiastic hill tribesmen.

The elephants marched single file to the edge of the broad Rapti River. The pachyderms squeaked and rumbled as they leaned into the current. Elephants speak in a subsonic language largely undetectable to the human ear. What we can hear has a deep bubbling quality, something like gastric distress. But it has great use as a means of communicating with other elephants over long distances, similar to how whale song transmits across the ocean. The white rhino and Sumatran rhino are now also known to engage in subsonic dialogue with other individuals of their kind. For large-mammal species that live at low numbers in dense habitat, such a trait must be of great use in locating one another, especially when females are receptive to breeding.

After crossing the Rapti, we fanned out in the tall grass. The elephants swept the area where Vishnu had found the sleeping rhino. A spotter saw it and waved his arm for the drivers to form a ring around the animal to prevent him from escaping once he was darted. A drugged rhino that staggered into the river would drown, and the fallout could scuttle our program before it even started.

Mel Kali moved in closer, carrying Vishnu and Sunder on her broad back. Faced with a charging rhino or tiger, a well-trained
elephant like Mel will stand her ground, trumpet, and scare it off. The driver guided her to the sleeping rhino and stopped at a distance of twenty meters. Sunder took aim at the rhino's enormous rump and—
Pop!
—made a perfect shot. The red chenille tail of the syringe hung from the rhino's posterior. Snorts of indignation from the front end heralded an imminent charge, but the attack never materialized because the narcotic quickly entered the rhino's nervous system. Sunder's textbook on wild animal capture indicated an eight-minute lapse between injection and sedation. He checked his watch; everything was running flawlessly.