As our Twitter followers will know, we have returned from our first five day trip to the forest. In five days of searching we found two dung piles, both rather old. Sarah’s team found both of them.
Our team of two national park technical staff (Mr Hai and Mr Long), two rangers (Mr Thai and Mr Huong), two local guides (Mr Nga and Mr Banh) and us and the dogs camped by a beautiful forest stream for four nights. One night we heard some Guar crashing through the bamboo towards our camp, until they heard us and bid a hasty retreat!
Each day we went out with the dogs to search for rhino dung. Most days our searches led us to wallows, in this photo you can see that by rolling around in the wallow (wallowing of course) the rhino has rubbed mud onto some over-hanging leaves.
At the wallows, rhino footprints were often clearly visible. Ageing the footprints is fraught with difficulty, but the lack of fallen leaves in these prints indicate that they were made very recently.
Those footprints led out of a wallow where a rhino had been moving around. The mud was deep, you can see where the rhino’s belly has flattened the mud in between the footprints here. Again, there is no debris in the areas flattened by the rhino, this and the cloudiness of the water where the rhino has been moving around indicated to us that the rhino had been here recently, perhaps as recently as the night before.
The same rhino then moved up into the forest, brushing against leaves as it went. Here is some mud from its side stuck to a palm frond. Although it is not really visible here, where the mud on the palm was thicker, it was still damp: we must have missed the rhino by only a few hours!
And here it has just crashed right through (the bamboo stems are about the width of a big human man’s arm):
Often, trails made by the rhino are not easy to follow – try crawling through this! And all to find a pile of poop…we're back out there tomorrow for another week.
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