Good to be back

It feels like a long time since we were last searching for dung in the forest. Chevy and I were excited to be back in the field:

And Bruiser was pleased to be doing some work as well.

We were was also excited about this:

We’ve both really missed the food we eat in the forest. Cured pork from the local ethnic minority people, rattan shoots, and various leaves, all fried or cooked in soups with packet noodles. Here's Mr. Vinh chopping rattan into a bamboo stem for cooking over the fire.

In-between all of this eating, we also found some more rhino dung. Sarah and Bruiser found this one. It looked like the rhino had defecated on top of an old dung pile which we had found months previously. Some of the old dung was still visible - it appeared that the pile contained dung from two different defecation events.

 This is very exciting, since it is perhaps the first indication that Javan Rhinos in Vietnam use latrines. This behaviour is well documented in other rhino species, and has been recorded in the Javan Rhino population at Ujung Kulon, Java. These latrines serve as communication points where several individuals defecate at the same spot, piling up the dung. This could indicate that there is more than one rhino using the area which we surveyed this time, but for now we don’t know - it could just be one lonely rhino using the latrine. In the closely related Indian Rhino, these heaps which can grow to up to five metres across and one metre high, although those of the Javan Rhino are always much smaller, perhaps because populations exist at a much lower density, and because both the rhinos and their dung are smaller.

We also re-found some of the dung piles which we had found on previous visits to this area of the forest. This was surprising, since some of them looked old and lacked boli (the round lumps of dung) when we first found them over two months ago – rhino dung can persist for at least three months in the dry season down here.