Javan rhino
The seldom seen Javan rhino is the rarest in the world. Now new research is trying to uncover more about these dwindling jungle inhabitants
I spent weeks searching the forest where these rhinos live, to no avail. They’re almost mythical.
We’re woken with a jolt by panicked shouting in the forest. When the commotion is followed by thunderous crashing just outside our tent, we’re well and truly pulled from our jetlagged slumber. It’s 4am in the Javanese jungle – we arrived and made camp just a few hours ago, exhausted after an eight-hour trek. Pulling on our junglewear, expedition partner Kyle McBurnie and I cautiously head out to investigate.
We find Chenglus, our expert tracker, sitting by the campfire looking dazed and unnerved – his mouth hanging open in shock as he slowly shakes his head. I gently ask what’s happened. Chenglus tells me that he made a small fire on the beach by the lagoon next to our makeshift camp and slept there, until he was woken by a furious snorting sound, as a bull rhino the size of a small car charged out of the darkness towards him.
He believes the rhino had seen the fire from the forest and wanted to take a closer look (perhaps out of territorial defiance, perhaps sheer curiosity), entering the lagoon and wading across its breadth. When the animal was within a few metres of Chenglus, it finally noticed him, turned to flee and crashed into the forest close to camp.
Chenglus has more experience with Javan rhinos in the wild than perhaps anyone else alive, yet he’d never known anything like this. To put this unlikely event into context, the Javan rhinoceros is the rarest large land mammal on Earth. The global population stands at about 70 individuals, and they all live in one forest on the island of Java, Indonesia.
Stomping ground
Once enjoying a vast distribution across most of Asia, as far west as India and as far north as China – in habitats ranging from the highest volcanic peaks to the lowest mangrove swamps – the rhino’s home has been shrinking for 3,000 years. Wars, habitat loss and trophy hunting were initially to blame for the rhino’s demise, until about 100 years ago when it faced a booming appetite for its horn.
Rhino horn has the same chemical makeup as fingernails and hair, yet gram-for-gram is now more valuable than diamonds. The species’ horn was historically sought after in Asia as a treatment for anything from cancer to snakebite, but nowadays it’s being used as a supposed cure for hangovers – hunting is pushing rhino species to the brink.
The Javan rhino clung to existence in Vietnam until 2010, when the last individual (an old female) was found with her horn hacked off in her remote forest home. The Vietnamese rhinos were a different subspecies, and her death sealed the extinction of her kind.
There have been no Javan rhinos in captivity for more than 100 years, and very few images exist of the species, so it’s not surprising that we know less about this rhino than any other. Few humans have ever set eyes on a Javan rhino in the wild, due to their extreme rarity and shyness, and the impenetrable nature of their habitat. Last year, I spent weeks searching the dense forest where they live, to no avail. They’re almost mythical.
Java’s Ujung Kulon National Park – a jungle of giant palms on a tsunamibattered peninsula in the shadow of Krakatoa – is the rhino’s only remaining stronghold. It is a rare example of a near-
Most of the information required to conserve species – from population and range size to movement patterns and nutritional health – relies on recognising individuals. Historically this has required capturing and handling animals, but that can be especially problematic when working with the world’s rarest species
– there are very few individuals, they’re often extremely shy, and they typically live in remote areas. Photo-ID is now widely used as an effective, less-invasive way of distinguishing individuals.
As a result of photo-ID efforts since 1980, an image catalogue now exists for most of the remaining 300 North Atlantic right whales. It’s provided much of our knowledge about the species’ population and habits – informing its conservation.
pristine wilderness somehow enduring on the most populated island (there are more than 140 million residents) on the planet.
We are in Ujung Kulon to determine whether we can survey the rhinos using photo-identification. If we can identify individual rhinos from photos – based on differences in their horns, wrinkles on their faces, scars and ear notches – and manage to photograph them multiple times, we could learn much about the remaining population’s ecology and life history, and how best to protect it.
Working with hugely knowledgeable rhino trackers (Chenglus Wahab and Meetha Kamita), our plan is to navigate the tangled river channels that wind deep into the rhinos’ core range.
Rhinos are (perhaps surprisingly) sensitive to overheating and sun damage – every day, they seek fresh water to cool down and mud to apply as sunscreen. For this reason, we believe they may be using the channels to bathe and wallow. Travelling by canoe on the water should be less disturbing than tramping through dense forest on foot, boosting our chances of seeing a rhino… in theory.
On the trail of a legend
With Chenglus recovered from his startling encounter on the beach, we set off on our first river transect in the dark, paddling as slowly and silently as possible. After working our way upstream by torchlight for an hour or so, pushing through curtains of vines and rafts of fallen debris from the canopy, Meetha (who I’m sharing a canoe with) freezes. He pats my shoulder and points into the blackness at what appears to be a log, floating motionlessly under the cover of an overhanging tree.
As we drift a little closer, the log acquires a new shape – it’s wide and round at one end and tapered to a narrow tip at the other. A jet of wet air erupts from the tapered end, making it look and sound exactly like a surfacing whale. I realise that 8m in front of us is a living, breathing Javan rhinoceros – a myth no more.
Two saucer-like ears rotate in opposite directions. The body is armoured like a tank with segmented plates – these are formed by thick folds of skin that shift as the animal moves.
We’re downwind of him, so he hasn’t picked up our scent – which is lucky, considering that all rhino species use their exceptional sense of smell to detect approaching danger, picking up chemical cues from a great distance. I slowly raise my lens and start to shoot, capturing its wrinkled face and small, neat horn. It continues to bathe in front of us for 10 minutes or so, before climbing out and melting into the wall of vegetation that rises out of the riverbank. We wait for a while in silent, jubilant disbelief at what we have witnessed, as we hear it trundle off through the jungle, palms cracking as they buckle under its weight.
Close-up encounters
Back at camp, we review the images. The rhino’s small, grey horn, compact head and relatively un-wrinkled face indicate to the trackers that this is a young male, perhaps eight years old (only male Javan rhinos have horns, and they are the smallest horns of all five rhino species). These features should make this male easy to identify in any other images we obtain – a promising start for photo-ID. We can also see he doesn’t look malnourished and appears in good health.
This exciting start fills us with hope for the weeks ahead, but working in tropical rainforest during the wet season comes with conditions – one of which is rain, lots of it, most of the time. We lose almost every other day on the river to torrential downpours, which flood the entire camp and plague us with swarms of biting flies.
Empty weeks of waiting and searching go by until one morning, just after sunrise, we paddle around a bend in the river, squeezing our canoes through a screen of fallen bamboo, and land almost on top of an enormous male rhino sitting in the middle of the channel. We’re only a few metres from him, yet he doesn’t flinch – rhinos have terrible eyesight and, luckily, we’re downwind again, so he can’t smell our approach. He appears to be enjoying his bath, snorting and puffing with his
The rhino continues to bathe in front of us, before climbing out and melting into the wall of vegetation.
Starting to take on water, we urgently paddle for camp, to avoid the resident saltwater crocodiles.
eyes closed, only his head and back bulging above the water surface. In the daylight, I see he has the same bulky size, rounded shape and purplish skin of a hippo.
We photograph all parts of his face in great detail – every ear tuft and skin notch, wrinkle and scar, and capture each part of his giant, plated head as he adjusts his position. His large, ridged horn indicates he is an older male. He has a unique bright pink scar behind his left ear – a skin lesion caused by a fungal parasite, the trackers tell me. He has a long, triangular front lip that hangs over a narrow, conical jaw. This allows him to effectively grasp leaves from bushes and trees – the Javan rhino is a browser (unlike the wide-mouthed white rhino that grazes on the African savannahs).
After a 20-minute dip, the rhino rolls himself towards the water’s edge, heaving his bulk through the mud and up onto the bank, revealing the scale of his body. I photograph the articulating plates of skin that bunch around the neck, hindquarters and knees until he picks up our scent and barrels off through the thicket of palms.
Having turned back, we are still several miles from home base when our canoe snags on a vine and punctures. Starting to take on water, we urgently paddle for camp, to avoid the resident saltwater crocodiles.
After patching up the canoe, days of paddling go by and the closest we come to a rhino is a wet mud-streak where one has recently slid down the riverbank. The only living mammal we actually see is a deer the size of a large rabbit (the endemic Java mouse deer), nibbling at the undergrowth.
Make me a match
And then our luck changes. After heading upstream, we come across a large male rhino snoring loudly in the mud at the river’s edge. After photographing him in detail, we analyse the images and note many features that match the animal we’d photographed four days earlier – it’s the same rhino! The encounter provides the first evidence that we can use photo-ID to effectively identify individuals and help survey the species.
Working in hot, wet jungles also means high infection risk, and when I lacerate my foot on a submerged rock, we have to evacuate to the nearest town before it turns septic. This means an early end to the expedition, but not before we secure detailed images of four different rhinos across five sightings – each animal distinctly identifiable, providing the clearest photographic record of the species and, we hope, the basis for a lasting photo-ID catalogue of individuals.
The Javan rhino may be the most endangered large mammal on the planet. Habitat encroachment due to a growing human population at the edge of the national park and the spread of an invasive Arenga palm (which reduces the area available for rhinos to feed) have put new pressures on the species. With all
remaining individuals in a single forest, their final stronghold is also extremely vulnerable to disease and natural disaster. Fears that tsunamis caused by Krakatoa’s near-constant eruptions could wipe out the species at a stroke have provoked plans to capture and relocate animals elsewhere, forming a second population (though these are currently on hold).
Being cooped up together does, however, mean that, unlike many other Critically Endangered mammals (including the Sumatran rhino), these animals can easily find each other, promoting gene flow and limiting inbreeding. Additionally, the rhino’s only home is intact and so well protected by patrol units that poaching has not been recorded for nearly two decades, despite the rising demand for rhino horn.
In short, the species is not beyond help. By uncovering more about its mysterious life, perhaps we can still ensure a future for the elusive, one-horned, jungle rhino.