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.

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. 

Bruiser

At the start of a new year, we welcome a new dog to the survey team: Bruiser! Bruiser will work with Sarah and replaces Pepper for the rest of the survey, whilst Pepper has gone back to the USA.

Steve from Packleader brought Bruiser over and provided a week of training for Sarah in working with the new dog. Bruiser had to acclimatise to the smells and temperature of Vietnam, and shed that thick winter coat he had grown in Washington state.

Although at first glance he might appear to be a bear, he’s actually a chocolate field Labrador and a massive version of Chevy! At seven years old Bruiser is one of the most experienced dung dogs at Packleader, having previously worked on a whole range of species, including five species of cat, tortoises and even bats. As well as finding rhino dung he also points out cat scat to Sarah, and checks the trees for roosting bats! Sarah’s looking forward to working with such an experienced dog, even though she’ll miss little Pepper.

Sarah and Bruiser ready to hunt some dung

Chevy's new friend is a bear!

Farewell Pepper dog

Dog blanket!

In the forest it is hot and sweaty during the day, but it gets really cold at night. Icicles form on your eye-lashes and your clothes freeze to the hammock. Well maybe it’s not that cold, but it certainly is cold – we wear four layers of clothing at night and we’re still chilly. So what to do?

Well…there’s a big warm dog lying there on his little platform just next to your hammock, so you invite him in…

 

 

Chevy can't get enough of the hammock, he'll jump in any time he gets a chance!

 

 

Fresh dung!

This week we found some fresh dung! Up till now all the dung we have found has been a little older, and dry. This should not be a problem, the dogs can still sniff it out and we can still collect samples for analysis, but it is just more exciting to find fresh dung. You can almost taste the rhino.

The action centred around a large swampy area which the rhinos like to visit. Sarah and her team first found some footprints and a rhino trail up on a ridge above the swamp.

Damp mud on a bamboo stem indicated that the rhino may have been here quite recently!

They followed the tracks and signs until they found the spot where the rhino had slid into the wallow.

We found the dung amongst the tree ferns, in a boggy area next to a small stream. The gleaming heap is in the foreground:

Back up on the nearby rattan covered ridges, Chevy also found two old piles of dung, this one is almost gone:

That makes 18 piles of rhino dung found during the first phase of the survey, here’s hoping for more in 2010!

No dung here. Part 1.

This week we found no dung, and no footprints. This was no surprise, since we were surveying in an area where rangers and local people had not recorded any rhino signs for 5-10 years. Up until this week we have been surveying in the part of the national park which rangers and local people regard as the only place where rhinos persist, there we had found rhino footprints every day. However, in the interests of scientific rigor, we are doing some surveys in adjacent forest as well. This was one of those weeks.

It was 6 km to our first camp, deep in some good broadleaved evergreen forest close to this stream where we and the dogs washed and swam.

Although the forest was good, there was a trap line along most ridges. Hunters had constructed knee-high drift fences out of brush to guide animals to gaps in the fence where snares were set. The snares are made of bicycle brake cable, a loop tied to a nearby sapling catches round the animal’s foot as it passes through a gap in the fence. Although the wire is too thin to catch a rhino, they do catch most other things, including civets, pangolins, small deer and wild pigs.

Here Sarah and Pepper are walking close to a drift fence:

This is a close up of the snare wire set over a gap in the fence, ready to catch an unsuspecting creature. I know it just looks like the forest floor, but then that's the point.

Not all trap lines are checked often enough to find everything that gets caught. These are part of the remains of a mouse deer which must have died and rotted away before hunters came back to check the trap.

Rangers responsible for protecting this part of the national park only patrol for up to five days in each month. In the part of the park where rhinos definitely persist, the Asian Rhino Project and WWF fund an additional five days of patrol effort each month, to reduce the risk to the rhinos. Although we have found snares in the rhino area, numbers of snares there were much lower than in the area where we have just been, Mr. Hai from the technical staff said that this was due to the extra patrolling effort funded by donors.

Whenever we found them, park staff and local guides removed the snares:

We also found a number of larger snares, which local people said had been set to catch Gaur (see also here). Here, Mr. Hai is removing a snare constructed from 0.6 mm (¼ inch) steel cable, similar to the one which we found on a rhino and Gaur trail on our previous trip into the forest. According to the internet (keeper of all truth), ¼ inch steel cable has a breaking strength of nearly three metric tons, so this snare could be a threat to a one ton rhino.

Here are all the snares found by one rhino searching team during the first day of this trip (there’s about fifty in the picture, including the thick one). We found many more on subsequent days.

Since this was to be a split site trip, we spent a day traveling to a new campsite a couple of kilometers away. Along the way we removed well over 100 snares along many kilometers of drift fence. We broke the journey at lunch time at a conveniently located hunters camp, a good place to take a break and eat some rice.

And then we destroyed it.

 

For reasons of space the story continues in part 2. Don't fret, you don't have to wait long for it, it's just below.