Where has all the water gone?

Like all living things, rhinos are dependant on water. But rhinos need water more than most animals. They spend a lot of time wallowing in muddy pools, both to cool down, and to keep their skin free from parasites. We also spend a lot of our time close to rhino wallows. The wallows are the easiest places to find footprints, which when followed, sometimes lead us to dung. Also, since we know that rhinos must visit these wet areas regularly, it makes sense for us to concentrate our dung searching efforts close to them as well.

But as the dry season advances, the wallows are drying out. With his large size and thick coat, Bruiser is also very dependant on water.

 

 

 

But with the wallows drying out, how is Bruiser going to keep cool?

With fewer wallows, the rhinos seem to be using the remaining streams more, and this makes it harder to find them, and their dung. 

Dung kicking

We found plenty of signs of rhinos on our latest trip to the forest, where we camped in the middle of prime rhino habitat. A rhino had crossed the stream just a few hundred metres up from the campsite sometime in the last couple of months (it’s not easy to estimate the age of footprints, so I won’t even try).

The rhino had headed in the direction of “bomb wallow” so called because it was created by a bomb dropped during the war. We found rhino footprints at the wallow as well.

We also found footprints in a big swampy area less than a kilometre from an ethnic minority village. Local people visit this swamp to collect palm fronds for roofing, often felling the whole palm to get the leaves.

Anywhere we find footprints, we spread out and search the area widely for dung.

Sarah and Bruiser found this dung pile on a bamboo covered ridge. Interestingly, it looked like the rhino had kicked the dung around with its back feet after defecating. Rhinos have scent glands in their feet, and this behaviour serves to distribute the scent more widely. Although all the other species of rhinos have been recorded doing this, as far as we are aware, it is the first indication that Javan Rhinos do it too. However, many of the dung piles we find are just that – piles, and do not look like they have been kicked around. So what’s going on, some Javan Rhinos do it and some don’t (just males, or just females perhaps?), or they do it sometimes, but not all the time? The more tantilising scraps of information we gather, the more it makes us aware of how little we know about these animals.