Rhinos are victims of Nepal strife

CHITWAN NATIONAL PARK: Everybody wants to sight a wild rhino in this park in southern Nepal. Crossing the Rapti river near the resort village of Sauraha, the tamed Asiatic elephant carrying five people on its back moves deeper into the forest.

“More than a dozen rhinos reside in this area,” Ram Adhikari, the Mahout says, as he thrashes the animal to divert left towards green pasturelands.

After ten minutes or so, he turns back and whispers, “There it is! There’s a mother with her baby!” Standing still, the animals munch their favourite meal: green grass from the pastureland. As the elephant moves closer, making sure that it isn’t disturbing the rhinos, those atop the elephant go click-click flashing their cameras.

“It’s so cute!” Janes, a tourist from Australia, reacts as others beam at the sight of what has been described by conservationists as “one of the most critically endangered species of wildlife.” Besides one-horned Asiatic rhinos, Chitwan is home to several other endangered species of wildlife like the Royal Bengal Tiger, Gharial crocodiles and nearly 500 species of birds, besides scores of mammal and aquatic species.

But the problem these days in this park — and the Bardia National Park in west Nepal — these days is this: everybody, including seasoned wildlife poachers and wildlife contraband smugglers, are looking for rhinos. And mysteriously, rhinos appear to be fast disappearing from the Sal forests and ‘riverine’ grasslands of the Rapti, the Narayani and the Karnali rivers both in Chitwan and Bardia.

Their falling numbers suggest just that. In the past six months’ time, 12 rhinos were killed by wildlife poachers in and around Chitwan national park, where the total population dwindled from 544 in 2000 to 372 in 2005, according to the official figures. And in Bardia national park in the west, where a new rhino habitat was created in the past two decades after moving adult rhinos from Chitwan, 49 of the 72 rhinos recorded there have gone missing, “quite mysteriously.” Of the 49 missing, only 23 were killed by the poachers.

Officials don’t know where the rest could have gone. Echoing the sentiment of a number of conservation officials, Chief Warden at the Bardia park, Phadindra Kharel, blames the long-running insurgency for that. Just like Kajiranga park in Assam in India, where the rhino population has grown to around 2,500 now from just around 100 a century ago, officials have hailed Nepal’s rhino conservation as another “success story.”

But that may not be true, and “the rhinos could just go extinct from Nepal if the current trend [of poaching and killing by villagers in retribution for destruction of their crops] is not reversed immediately,” says Mangal Man Shakya, an activist with the Kathmandu-based Wildlife Watch Group.