The Kingdom of Rarities (20 page)

Today, one still finds very large mammals in the tropical belt where a deadly disease such as Ebola, malaria, or dengue fever is rampant, where the soil is infertile, or where both conditions leave the landscape better suited to wildlife than to human habitation and agriculture. In other places, such as sub-Saharan Africa, outbreaks of diseases such as rinderpest and sleeping sickness, carried by the tsetse fly, spread among livestock and their herders, preventing both from occupying natural habitats. Until 1950, a deadly strain of malaria kept the Terai zone habitat of the one-horned rhino in Nepal and India virtually free of humans and relatively intact. Before 1950, there is every reason to believe, rhino numbers in Chitwan exceeded 1,000 individuals, a healthy population by any count.

In the mid-twentieth century, several political and social changes in Nepal and India indirectly contributed to the rhinos' steep decline and then to their beginning recovery. First came the fall in the early 1950s of the autocratic Rana kings who had ruled the country for one hundred years. The Ranas' overthrow reversed the policy of using the Terai forests as a malaria-ridden barrier to ward off would-be invaders (the British) from the south. The threat of invasion disappeared with India's attainment of independence from Britain, and beginning in the late 1950s, malaria eradication programs in the Terai—financed largely by foreign aid agencies—brought the scourge under control. This opened the Chitwan Valley to settlement by the tens of thousands of impoverished hill farmers who streamed in from all over Nepal. Unfortunately for the greater one-horned rhino, its preferred feeding areas, covered in wild sugarcane, also made the most productive rice paddies. The human population in this region rose from 36,000 to 100,000 in a decade. By 1960, the entire length of the 160-kilometer-long valley was inhabited, and most of the forest and grassland habitat had been converted to a brilliantly colored mosaic of mustard, rice, and maize. Similarly, malaria control in India across the entire Terai belt, including along the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers, spurred
rapid land conversion. In a few decades, the Terai elephant-grass ecosystem shrank to less than 2 percent of its original range.

Other threats emerged to the rhinos' well-being, as well as to that of Chitwan's other famous charismatic large mammal, the tiger. By the late 1950s, hunters had dispersed throughout the Chitwan Valley, poaching the rhino for its valuable horn and tigers for their bones and skin and the male's penis. Before the eradication of malaria in the area, the density of tigers must have been staggering, perhaps among the highest in the world. During a royal hunt led by the Rana kings of Nepal in the winter of 1938, during the two-month window when the malaria-carrying mosquitoes were inactive, 125 tigers were shot in a relatively small part of Chitwan. To put this in perspective, the number of tigers shot in that narrow section of no more than 50 kilometers long and a few kilometers wide in 1938 equals about half the number of adult tigers occupying, in 2012, what is now the Terai Arc Landscape—a 1,000-kilometer stretch of eleven tiger reserves and connecting jungles across lowland Nepal and adjacent India.

With continued settlement and expanded rice cultivation, the rhino population plummeted. The first wildlife biologist to visit the area, the famed E. P. Gee in 1959, estimated that only 300 individuals were left at the time. The precipitous decline of rhinoceroses and tigers, just after Gee's survey, eventually led to the creation of Royal Chitwan National Park in 1973 and, two years later, to two other wildlife reserves—Royal Bardia National Park and Suklaphanta Wildlife Reserve—both former royal hunting reserves. In 1975, the British graduate student Andrew Laurie, the first to conduct a field study of greater one-horned rhinoceroses in Chitwan, estimated the total number of that species in the park to be between 250 and 280 animals.

When possible, biologists strive to conduct longitudinal studies, that is, research programs conducted over long enough time scales to yield insights that the typical field study, which averages one to
three years, often misses. In 1986, a Smithsonian Institution project that had been focusing on tigers since 1972 embarked on population monitoring of the rhinos, which has continued to this day with little interruption. These studies would allow us to track long-term trends in the population and, most of all, to determine whether it is rebounding and has responded to increased protection. So it was that, beginning in 1986, Vishnu, his fellow trackers, eighteen drivers, and I rode our elephants from one end of the park to the other to photograph every rhino we saw. Each day we would spread out with five elephants to search for a rhino. When we discovered a new individual or a familiar rhino that lacked a revealing set of photographs, we would surround the subject. The other four elephants would usher the rhino toward my sturdy mount, and my camera would capture its left side, right side, front, rear, and horn. I made a special effort to note irregularities in the skin folds, knobs of extra skin, cuts and scars, clipped tails, broken horns, odd pigmentation, and a variety of other characteristics that would aid in recognition of individuals. Over time, we amassed a rhino register with a distinctive name for each individual and personalized notes
about where it lived, its sex, the size of its horn, and, for females, the presence and birth date of a calf.

Male greater one-horned rhinoceros (
Rhinoceros unicornis
)

After three years of surveying the park, we found that the entire Chitwan population of rhinos had grown from around 270 in 1975 to around 400 by 1988. The encouraging trend showed that even very large, slow-breeding mammals can begin to recover from bouts of near extinction when they are protected from poaching and a nucleus population of around 50 animals still exists. Rhinos are not bristly rabbits when it comes to breeding biology. Females reach sexual maturity at about six years, gestation takes sixteen months, and they give birth to a single calf on average every three to three and a half years. One key to a rapid rebound for any large-bodied rarity is to reduce the loss of adult females. Another is the ability of large herbivores to adjust a key aspect of their reproductive portfolio, what biologists call the interbirth interval. Normally, the period between the birth of one calf to a female rhino and her next birth is almost four years. But a species can cut that period almost in half if it enjoys excellent forage and plenty of space.

About 150 rhinos lived within a three-hour march of our field station. To search more distant haunts, we went on safari for two weeks at a time, an experience the trackers and even the elephants seemed to relish. Typically, we picked camping spots near water and good grazing for the elephants, deep in the heart of Chitwan's jungles. The safaris began in mid-February, with the approach of the hot season. The dried-up elephant grass blanketing the floodplains had been burnt to the ground in fires caused by lightning or set by elephant drivers to improve forage conditions for the wild grazers. Now a carpet of green shoots attracted herds of deer and hungry rhinos. Tigers, invisible for most of the year, stalked through the green blades and charred stems. For a two-month window, the invisible wildlife of the Chitwan grassland was just as watchable as wildlife in the Serengeti.

When our survey team reached the Narayani River, the western
border of Chitwan, we had come to the park's wildest part. Unlike the animals that lived near our base camp, the rhinos here spooked easily, lacking much exposure to humans or domesticated elephants. They either ran away as soon as we approached or, in the case of some bulls, ran straight at us. Near the edge of the Narayani, the elephants spread out on the floodplain. The grass had yet to burn off here, so it still provided ample cover for the prey of the tiger—sambar deer, axis deer, hog deer, wild boars. Suddenly Mel Kali, bobbing through the thick grass to our left, banged her trunk against the ground with a loud thump: she'd picked up the scent of a tiger. “
Bhaag
,
bhaag!
” the driver whispered gleefully to me. “Tiger, tiger!” He gave the adventurous smile our mahouts flashed whenever danger was at hand. My elephant, Prem Kali, lifted her trunk over the rustling stalks to sniff the air and brought it down heavily on the ground.
Thump!
Then she emitted a deep rumble, picked up by the other elephants. The grass was so thick they couldn't see one another, but their subsonic vocalizations helped them communicate the movement of the predator.

The tiger, a big male, waited until we were nearly on top of him before he unleashed a thundering roar and flashed by us in a blur of orange and black. Unable to contain herself any longer, Prem Kali trumpeted, and the other elephants echoed her blast. In seconds the tiger was leagues of grass away.

By the end of the morning, our rhino photo shoot was over for the day and it was time to meet up for lunch. Kancha Bahadur Lama, another of Vishnu's childhood chums, was our jeep driver, and he planned to meet us at a crossroads to deliver a hot meal. Earlier, several families of fishermen—ethnic Bote people—had given us some smoked fish in return for scaring off the lurking tiger. Now we could look forward to our meal of fish and rice. We reached the rendezvous, but no Kancha Lama. No worries; faithful Kancha would show. The drivers removed the elephants' saddles and let them graze the nearby lemongrass. Soon the air was filled with perfume as the elephants' trunks plucked aromatic bundles
of grass, whacked them against a foreleg to dislodge any dirt, and stuffed them into their mouths.

Thirty minutes, and then an hour, passed. Kancha Lama and our lunch still hadn't arrived. Vishnu immediately switched roles from head tracker to executive chef. Under his direction, the men dispersed and came back with the ingredients of a jungle tasting menu:
Grewia
berries, fresh wild ginger stems, the smoked fish, and his inspiration, peacock eggs Vishnu.

We sat down to our repast. The food may have lacked refinement, but it was infused with the good spirit of those who gathered and prepared it.
Grewia
fruits taste like wild blueberries and are a favorite of the sloth bear. This usually fierce, shaggy denizen of the floodplain dines on termites and ants, much as would an anteater or giant armadillo in other parts of the world. But when
Grewia
fruits are around, sloth bears feast on them as grizzlies do on wild huckleberries. The wild ginger stems were a revelation. Fragrant and with a bite, they could replace sorbet as a palate cleanser. Vishnu built a small fire, set the avocado-sized peacock eggs at the edge to cook in their shells, and warmed the smoked fish, which he had wrapped in lemongrass leaves. Lacking an egg timer, Vishnu waited for the first of the eggs to explode and then quickly removed the rest from the heat. The golf ball–sized yolks were quite edible, but the whites had assumed the texture of vulcanized rubber. I left my share for the jackals. An hour later, Kancha Lama finally arrived, red-faced and to much teasing, including how he missed out on the adventure.

The elephants had rested and were now bathing in the Narayani. With time on our hands, we lit up hand-rolled cigarettes known as bidis. Smoking by the riverbank, we watched busy cormorants hunt for their dinner. The bright green water shifted and swirled in eddies around sand bars. A few kilometers from where we sat, the river bent south on its way to meet the Ganges. In a month or so, the monsoon would arrive and the Narayani would flood, washing away all signs of our meal. But this perfect day—charging rhinos, a flashing tiger, fishing cormorants, the fragrance of elephants
feeding on lemongrass, topped off by a turn as hunter-gatherers—would never fade from my memory.