DUNG!!!

Another training day and only our second visit to forest where the rhinos are found, this time we went one better than footprints: dung!!! We split into our two teams and met up at lunchtime at a beautiful wallow on a ridge (don’t worry, I haven’t gone rhino crazy, the wallow really was beautiful!).

See, it is beautiful

My team went up a stream, which Chevy loved, and then climbed up to a ridge and headed south to the wallow. Chevy ran up and down the stream and threw himself into all the fastest flowing bits of water. We found some three week old dung just down hill from the ridge when we had spread out to re-find the trail which we had temporarily mislaid.

Chevy and the stream which excited him so much

 Our first rhino dung!!! Badly decomposed, but still dung.

Sarah and her team started by going straight up a steep slope and then followed a different ridge to get to the wallow. The trail passed through dense bamboo and rattan thickets. Mr Hai, the vice-head of the technical department at the park, who accompanied my team, said that rattan was often eaten by the rhinos. On the way back we found another four dung piles, each two or three weeks old. Hai also showed us a place where a rhino had recently slept: very cool!

A rhino sleeping place

It’s really exciting to be finding so many rhino signs already, but how many rhinos are involved? It’s hard to imagine that the dung we found today was from more than two rhinos, and it’s quite possible that only one was involved in all the signs we’ve found so far in the small area that we have searched, only time and DNA analysis will tell…