Rhino footprints!

We found our first rhino footprints today! We are still in the training phase, so for our first day in the forest where the rhinos live we took the dogs on a short walk with rangers Huong and Hong to a wallow close to our village. The wallow is located at the head of a small stream which flows into rice paddies a couple of a kilometers from the house where we are staying.

Sarah and Steve in the field

A few years ago the paddies surrounding the wallow were fenced off and allowed to revert back to natural vegetation, to reduce disturbance to the wallow which is used by both Gaur (a species of wild cattle) and the rhino. Now the fields support a mixture of grasses and sedges growing in the swampy ground. We didn’t actually manage to get to the wallow because the mud was too deep, but there were many footprints and rhino paths through the grassland close to it. The rangers thought that the prints were about a week old.

Rhino footprint, honest

No dung yet but a very exciting start for our first trip into the field!