Last days

Our last few surveys have now taken place. We’ve had a number of visitors during these trips to the forest.

First, Junaidi Payne, Marshall Mathews and Fredelis Bungin from WWF Malaysia and Borneo Rhino Alliance visited us for a few days. We chatted about rhinos and dogs, and they came to see how we worked so that they could evaluate the potential for using dogs for rhino surveys in Sabah.

Here’s Junaidi pondering the dogs.

Marshall taking a break on the long hike into the forest.

And Fred leaping dexterously from rock to rock in a stream.

We went to a couple of wallows, but we didn’t find any new dung.

Julianne Becker from the WWF office in Hanoi came to shoot some footage for a film on the rhino survey.

It was time to put on those WWF t-shirts and do our thing in front of the camera.

The dogs performed as expected as well.

And that was the end of that.

We’ve now finished the dung collection survey. In total we found and sampled 22 dung piles. These will be sent off to Queens University in Ontario, Canada, for genetic analysis. Once the analysis is complete, we will know exactly how many rhinos were responsible for the dung, what sex each of them are, and how they are related to each other. People keep asking us how many rhinos we think there are – we don’t know yet and we won’t know for another few months. Watch this space for the answer!

In the next few weeks we’ll continue blogging. Our lives will be more mundane, so instead of boring you with the details of what rhino dung finders do after the survey is over, we will continue to post pictures of the forest, dogs, people and, if you're lucky, barely visible rhino signs, until we have run out.

Cashew harvest

Down here at our field site if it isn’t forest, and it isn’t rice, then it’s almost always cashew. Cashew nuts are the favoured cash-crop for local people in and around the national park. Almost all of the forest surrounding the national park, and some of the forest inside it, has been converted to cashew plantations. 

These hills just outside of the national park are covered in recently planted cashew trees:

For most of the year the plantations don’t require the attention of their owners, but now as the dry season reaches it’s height, the cashew trees produce their famous nuts.

The first stage in the harvest is to clear the vegetation below the trees, usually by fire.

The nuts grow like little commas just below the fruits.

Some of the trees have fruit that is yellow, and some have fruit that is red. It isn’t a ripeness thing.

Local people set up camps inside the more remote plantations to harvest the cashew.

Then they wait for the fruit to fall to the ground. The lack of ground vegetation makes them easy to find.

In other countries where cashew nuts are harvested people pick them off the trees, so that they can crush the fruit to make juice (it tastes great). But here there’s no market for the fruit, so it just rots on the ground.

 

People harvest the nuts by just picking them up.

The nuts are dried in the sun

Then they’re put into sacks and taken to dealers by motorbike.

Don't worry, you haven't come to the wrong blog. If you're missing all those pictures of soil where if you squint you just about make out a rhino footprint, or those pictures of bamboo stems crushed by a rhino, or leaves smeared with mud off the back of a rhino, or if it's just pictures of the dogs that you'e after, you'll be pleased to know that this blog will be back to normal again soon. 

Some of our other freinds

As the dry season advances, we are searching out the few remaining wet areas in the hope of finding rhino footprints. Once we find footprints, we can try to follow them and this should, in theory, lead us to the precious dung. We also wander haphazardly through the forest in the hope of a chance dung encounter, but in general, we feel that targeted searching is more likely to get us the results. In the parts of the forest where there are no wallows, we head for the swamps, or follow streams.

Sarah and Bruiser spent some time in this swamp, where some ethnic minority people were trying to catch fish.

Sarah and Bruiser found some old rhino prints (which Simon had seen back in January), but they didn’t find any dung.

Although the rhinos are proving hard to find, we found plenty of evidence of Gaur. There were footprints and dung close to our camp:

This impromptu streamside wallow (to the left of this picture) had a Guar footprint in it. These wallows are also used extensively by Wild Pig.

Wild Pig foraging signs are easy to detect, both by sight and by their distinctive smell! Nothing is more exciting than a photo of some turned over ground...

Sambar are the largest species of deer in the national park, we sometimes find their prints in wet areas. The smallest deer in the national park are the mouse-deer, or chevrotains. Here is some mouse-deer dung:

Who lives in a house like this? Local people said that this was a porcupine burrow, and they may well be correct, but could it house a pangolin? Or something else…?

On the search for the rhino

As planned, we headed north this week to search for those elusive rhinos. We began with a boat journey to an ethnic minority village. The river was really low and sometimes the boat had to be pulled upstream.  

Then we traveled to another village along a busy track through the forest. The rangers went by motorbike, whilst we walked with our two chocolate labradors. The remaining forest on the way was beautiful tall broadleaved evergreen forest with patches of bamboo. We heard Yellow-cheeked Crested Gibbons and Germain’s Peacock Pheasant as we walked along.

  

After a night in the village we headed deep into the forest. We surveyed an area near to where we had not found signs of rhinos before, back in December. Although the topography was steep, much of the forest in this part of the national park is better than forest we usually work in.

We were close to the northern border of the national park, at some points we could see through the trees across the river to the land outside the national park on the other side – recently converted to cashew plantations.

Each day we headed out towards swamps, searching for dung along the way. At the swamps we looked for footprints – evidence of the presence of rhinos in the area. However we found only prints of Gaur, Sambar Deer and Wild Pig.

  

Sarah and Bruiser had a particularly grueling day. Although they only traveled two kilometers, they were out of camp for eight hours – hacking their way through a hillside covered in spiny rattan palm (as modelled by Simon in the last photo).

 

So, no rhinos in this area. Although they had probably moved north from where local people expected them to be at this time of year, they had not strayed as far north as the  part of the national park where we surveyed this time. All the same, there’s no harm in being thorough. Next week we’ll head to the area just to the south of where we were this week, here’s hoping we find some fresh dung…

 

Where have all the rhinos gone?

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve found any new rhino dung, and during that time we haven’t found any recent signs of rhino activity in the areas the rhinos are thought to use the most. So where have all the rhinos gone?

Talking to park staff and local people, it seems that the rhinos (or rhino) have moved a little to the north and east of the usual areas. Following these suggestions, we took a long walk out from one of our camps recently, and found rhino footprints along a river. Local people said that a rhino had been in that area in early February. Here's a rhino's eye view of the location where it entered the river:

In the next few weeks we’ll concentrate on this part of the study area, searching for the ever elusive Javan Rhino dung.

 

 

So why have the rhinos moved? As we reported last week there are now fewer wet wallows and swampy areas down here, but it’s hard to imagine that this is the only factor causing the rhinos to move. There is still enough mud and water for me to sink up to my waist in places such as this:

And enough wetness to keep a large water-loving animal such as this one very happy:

The rhinos movements could be related to seasonal changes in water or food availability, but we don’t really know. There are no data on the rhino movements here across a number of years, or during this time of year, so it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from what we are finding, or not finding as the case may be! Whatever the reasons for the movements, we’re just hoping that we can track the rhinos down in the next couple of weeks and get our hands on more of that dung (not that we actually touch it with our hands, of course, owing to risk of DNA contamination). 

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.