The Kingdom of Rarities (23 page)

What started as a small research program in 1986 had grown by 1999 into one of the world's most successful restoration efforts of a rare mammal, winning international acclaim for the country and for Mishra. By the year 2000, more than 85 rhinos had been translocated to two different populations in Bardia and 6 to Suklaphanta. The combined rhino populations in Chitwan, Bardia, and Suklaphanta had shot up to more than 600. Importantly, the local people also benefited. For many years Chitwan had been the major wildlife tourist destination for visitors to Asia from industrialized nations. The chance to see rhinos and possibly a tiger drew these nature lovers. New legislation was passed to benefit local communities: revenues generated by park entry fees and hotel concessions were recycled into village economies on the periphery of the park.

I wish the story could have ended here—an account of a triumphant recovery of a once common species made rare by humans
but given a second chance. But Nepal soon plunged into its darkest period in modern history. After a popular call for a democratic government, King Birendra accepted the change from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in 1990. But democracy failed to take root, and word began to filter out of the western hills of a violent separatist group that called itself Maoist and sought the overthrow of the monarchy and the creation of a communist state.

Then, in 2000, the unthinkable occurred: most of the royal family was assassinated by one of its own. The kingdom went into mourning as the middle brother, Gyanendra, assumed the throne. Units of the Royal Nepalese Army that had been stationed in the national parks, partly to protect rhinos and other wildlife, were soon shifted into the hills to fight the Maoists, leaving the parks wide open to emboldened poachers. The devastating results provided a glimpse of how civil unrest or even civil war can be the death knell for rarities.

In Bardia, all of the 70 or so rhinos that had been translocated to the Babai Valley were wiped out. Chitwan suffered a staggering blow, losing about 170 rhinos to poachers. Its rhino population dropped from around 550 to about 370, about the same level as when we finished our census in 1987. For a while, all seemed lost.

And then, in 2005, Nepal began to right itself. The citizenry rallied, a peace movement emerged, and the government negotiated a cease-fire with the Maoists.

When the smoke cleared, our survey teams returned to assess the damage in Bardia and Suklaphanta. The Babai population of rhinos was gone, but all was not lost. The first group of rhinos moved to the western border of Bardia along the Karnali River in 1986 had grown from 13 to more than 30 animals. Several calves had been born in Suklaphanta, where the rhino population had almost doubled from the 4 reintroduced there. Across the border in India, rhinos sent from Chitwan had helped start a founder population in Dudhwa National Park that remained stable. A few colonists from Bardia had crossed into India's Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary and started another breeding group, and then some from Suklaphanta had
crossed into India, to the Kishanpur Wildlife Sanctuary. So while overall numbers were down, the risk of extinction—and the promise of recovery—had been distributed among five reserves.

There was no way to deny that the large number of rhinos poached in Chitwan and Bardia represented a enormous loss. But when a few more were killed by poachers in 2006, the people of Chitwan District took action. They gathered 100,000 signatures on a petition demanding that the government uphold its obligation to protect the rhinos. This remarkable display of popular conservation support is a rarity itself. It demonstrated that even in the poorest regions on Earth local residents may recognize their unique heritage and have pride enough to want to preserve it. There were also good economic reasons for doing so. By 2009, as much as $400,000 per year was going to park border communities to build schools, health posts, and roads. More rhinos meant more tourists, more tourists meant more revenue for local development and protection, and that completed the circle for more rhinos.

Now protection has returned to the Terai reserves, and the rhinos are poised for yet another comeback. The census in 2011 revealed a total of 534 individuals, a gain of more than 100 animals in three years. So even relatively slow-breeding giant mammals can be quite resilient, capable of rebounding quickly, if we provide basic protection. But when protection fails, or poachers run rampant, the gains can be wiped out overnight. The poaching epidemic currently raging in South Africa, home to 80 percent of the world's rhinos, tells us that rhino poachers have become more organized, better financed, better armed, and more ruthless. In 2011, more than 450 rhinos were poached in South Africa; in 2012, the number might reach 600. The poachers are no longer poor villagers but now are operatives in international crime rings.

My experience in the elephant grass taught me that in the absence of our species, these giant mammals might be far from rare in the highly specialized habitat they prefer. That habitat was once
abundant, and the rhino beautifully adapted to it and the sweep of the monsoon floods that so characterize its environment. Unlike the Kirtland's warbler and other habitat specialists, the greater one-horned rhino is heavily persecuted for its body parts and comes into conflict with villagers, and without protection its stomping grounds would soon be usurped by poor farmers looking for this last available piece of rice paddy. Yet, despite all these constraints, the species thrives if given a bit of protection. In fact, the same is true for virtually all large mammals, even those that reach maturity after a long adolescence and that have only one offspring at a time, long gestations, and multiyear interbirth intervals. Whether they are habitat specialists, like the greater one-horned rhino, or habitat generalists, like the African elephant, one aspect rises above all others in a shared conservation strategy: protect the females and let them breed and live to an old age, and recovery happens much faster than even the cynics could ever imagine.

We must up the ante if we are to recover these tough creatures, who would just as soon trample those who try to save them as those who poach them for their horn. Beyond rhinos, there are the stalking tigers, the grizzlies digging for tubers, the lions lounging under the acacias—all of these species remain unaware of our efforts on their behalf and sometimes see us more as prey than protectors. It is yet another sign of the cultural evolution of our own species that we can reconcile the conservation of species that we fear most and create sanctuaries where they can thrive.

There is a spiritual dimension to rarity, too, I believe, hiding there in the elephant grass, in the acacia savannas, or in the grizzly range. The presence of large, potentially dangerous mammals connects us to something deep and primal and teaches us humility in a way that is unique and precious. We must not lose it. Wild species that leave footprints larger than our own are now among the rarest of all mammals. Places where they still dominate the landscape must be part of the legacy we bequeath to future generations.

H
UMAN ACTIVITIES, AS THE STORIES
of the greater one-horned rhinoceros and other species have shown us, sometimes bring species back from the brink of extinction. But more often they exacerbate rarity even to the point of disappearance, drive into rarity species once common, or further constrain those species that normally have narrow ranges or live at low densities. The most dramatic change happening today that is pushing already uncommon species toward even greater rarity is the conversion of rain forests and natural savannas into commodities production for industrialized agriculture. Big Ag, as it is now known, is largely mechanized, highly profitable, and controlled by multinational corporations. Some biologists and geographers describe extension of this trend as the future; increasingly, we live on a cultivated planet. The loss of natural habitats through nonagricultural use—that is,
human settlements—and in nontropical areas is also high, but the conversion is greatest in the tropics and through big agriculture.

Few field biologists bother to check the daily price of soybeans or palm oil. This is an oversight because the market value of these commodities—along with that of beef, corn, sugar, and coffee—may over the coming decades define the future of rare species more profoundly than will any other driver of habitat loss. At present, nowhere is the conversion and fracturing of rain forests by industrialized agriculture in the world's hotbeds of rarity more evident than in Southeast Asia and Brazil. In Kalimantan and Sumatra, Indonesia, expansion of oil palm and wood pulp plantations threatens the most species-rich rain forests in the world. In Brazil, vast areas of the Amazon are turning into cattle ranches and soybean farms. In addition to causing habitat loss, such rampant conversion imperils climate stability. Nearly 70 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released annually from tropical forests originate from agriculturedriven forest conversion in just two places, Riau Province, Sumatra, and the state of Mato Grosso, at the edge of the Amazon in Brazil.

The plight of the Brazilian Amazon grabs headlines, but the status of its neighbor, the Cerrado, remains veiled in obscurity. This omission is a pity because the savannas of South America hold the key to reaching a balance between safeguarding rarities and growing the food we eat. Few environmental journalists are familiar with the Cerrado, which represents about 21 percent of Brazil and where both the total amount and annual rate of habitat conversion is higher than in the Amazon region. Over the past fifty years, more than 55 percent of the native habitat of the Cerrado has been cleared to make way for crops and livestock. Only about 2 percent of the region receives formal protection from the federal government, and Brazil's Forest Code, at least on paper, requires protection of habitat on 20–30 percent (depending on the Brazilian state) of private lands.

The Cerrado borders the Amazon rain forest to the west and the green ribbon of the Atlantic Forest to the east. To the south
lies the vast seasonal swamp known as the Pantanal. The Cerrado ranks as the world's most diverse tropical savanna, even richer than the miombo, a similar habitat in southern Africa. The miombo's infertile soils and tsetse fly infestations repel agriculturalists, whereas the Cerrado can be farmed for commercial crops after some soil modification. It has become the world's largest producer of soybeans and beef and soon will be a major producer of sugarcane. The Cerrado has the dubious distinction—along with the previously mentioned Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan—of being among the most biologically diverse landscapes being converted most rapidly to agriculture.

This endangered tropical savanna features an unusual trio of rare mammals—the giant anteater, giant armadillo, and maned wolf. Very few tourists travel to Brazil explicitly to see them, even though the Cerrado offers the best chances of a sighting anywhere in the world. The ecotourism value of these species per hectare is far below the return that ranchers receive for beef cattle, soy, and sugarcane. So how do these rare species, along with jaguars, pumas, tapirs, and other wide-ranging Cerrado vertebrates, cope with massive landuse change driven by human economics?

Biologists who point out that a number of species can coexist in environmentally friendly cultivated zones have coined the term “countryside biogeography” (“matrix conservation” in Europe) to characterize the study of this phenomenon. This new discipline is essentially the study of which species persist in agricultural landscapes, assuming that interspersed with intensively used farmland are patches of natural habitat. To explore this issue and its relevance to the preservation of rarity, our next stops include Serra da Canastra and Emas National Parks in Brazil, at the edge of an expanding agricultural frontier that threatens to plow under rarity. Here, biologists are using a startling field technique that, along with the global positioning system collars worn by jaguars and pumas in the Peruvian Amazon (see chapter 3), could revolutionize the study of rare vertebrates.