Rhinomania!: No dung here. Part 1.

This week we found no dung, and no footprints. This was no surprise, since we were surveying in an area where rangers and local people had not recorded any rhino signs for 5-10 years. Up until this week we have been surveying in the part of the national park which rangers and local people regard as the only place where rhinos persist, there we had found rhino footprints every day. However, in the interests of scientific rigor, we are doing some surveys in adjacent forest as well. This was one of those weeks.

It was 6 km to our first camp, deep in some good broadleaved evergreen forest close to this stream where we and the dogs washed and swam.

Although the forest was good, there was a trap line along most ridges. Hunters had constructed knee-high drift fences out of brush to guide animals to gaps in the fence where snares were set. The snares are made of bicycle brake cable, a loop tied to a nearby sapling catches round the animal’s foot as it passes through a gap in the fence. Although the wire is too thin to catch a rhino, they do catch most other things, including civets, pangolins, small deer and wild pigs.

Here Sarah and Pepper are walking close to a drift fence:

This is a close up of the snare wire set over a gap in the fence, ready to catch an unsuspecting creature. I know it just looks like the forest floor, but then that's the point.

Not all trap lines are checked often enough to find everything that gets caught. These are part of the remains of a mouse deer which must have died and rotted away before hunters came back to check the trap.

Rangers responsible for protecting this part of the national park only patrol for up to five days in each month. In the part of the park where rhinos definitely persist, the Asian Rhino Project and WWF fund an additional five days of patrol effort each month, to reduce the risk to the rhinos. Although we have found snares in the rhino area, numbers of snares there were much lower than in the area where we have just been, Mr. Hai from the technical staff said that this was due to the extra patrolling effort funded by donors.

Whenever we found them, park staff and local guides removed the snares:

We also found a number of larger snares, which local people said had been set to catch Gaur (see also here). Here, Mr. Hai is removing a snare constructed from 0.6 mm (¼ inch) steel cable, similar to the one which we found on a rhino and Gaur trail on our previous trip into the forest. According to the internet (keeper of all truth), ¼ inch steel cable has a breaking strength of nearly three metric tons, so this snare could be a threat to a one ton rhino.

Here are all the snares found by one rhino searching team during the first day of this trip (there’s about fifty in the picture, including the thick one). We found many more on subsequent days.

Since this was to be a split site trip, we spent a day traveling to a new campsite a couple of kilometers away. Along the way we removed well over 100 snares along many kilometers of drift fence. We broke the journey at lunch time at a conveniently located hunters camp, a good place to take a break and eat some rice.