Three days after the tragic death of Tam, the last male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia, I travel two kilometres down the logging track to the only place nearby where I know I can still come close –at least in spirit –to a rhino.
Here, surrounded by the logged and old-growth forests of the world famous Danum Valley Conservation Area sits a large concrete and corrugated-iron barn. It’s encircled by a wire fence which might once have been electrified. Now, there is no tell-tale whirr of current and as I go to climb over the padlocked gate, it swings open under my feet.
The whole place looks like it would be more at home on a farm in South Gloucestershire than slap bang in the middle of one of the largest tracts of remaining lowland dipterocarp forest in Southeast Asia. An unused generator stands silent in the corner. Tufts of grass push through cracks in the paved-over ground near two barred animal pens.
I slide the bolt back and step into one of the enclosures. It’s about 4 by 3 metres in size and the bars around the outside are fatter than my legs. At the back of the pen, a gate opens out on to a large piece of walled-off rainforest. It was meant as a playground– and a safe haven –for frolicking rhinos. There’s just one problem. The facility is empty. There are no rhinos to be seen here.
Outside the wire fences stands a dilapidated sign proclaiming that this is Danum Valley Borneo Rhino Sanctuary– used for the captive breeding of the Borneo rhinoceros, the smallest among the 5 species of rhino found in the world and highly endangered by extinction.
Then, after a message warning tourists to keep out, the sign ends with a bracketed admission of the glaringly obvious.
There is no rhino in captivity as yet.
From what I’ve been able learn about the facility here, it was never been put to use. In 2004/5, conservationists carried out a large-scale camera trapping survey and search throughout the forests of Danum Valley looking for one of the world’s most endangered mammals. They found nothing. Later, in 2010, they found rhino footprints, but another large-scale search yielded no further evidence. And then in 2014, a big break.
A team of rangers–amongst them, my friend, Osou–discovered a rhino wallow. Staff from WWF, the Borneo Rhino Alliiance (BORA) and the Sabah Forestry Department descended on Danum, and soon after, Iman was caught in one of two pitfall traps set in the forest understorey. But as possibly the last rhino in Danum Valley, she was taken to a different sanctuary hundreds of kilometres away in Tabin–where it was hoped that she would breed in captivity with the recently deceased Tam.
Efforts to find, capture and breed Sumatran rhino stem from the sad fact that habitat loss and hunting have left the creatures a victim of their own rarity. With as few as 30-80 rhino probably left on the planet today, existing in scattered and tiny sub-populations, the chances of rhinos finding a receptive mate in the wild are vanishingly low. Their survival depends on successful and collaborative captive breeding, and the introduction of young, fertile, wild-caught rhino into these breeding programmes.
It’s still not too late for the Sumatran rhino.
But as I stand in the concrete pen, surrounded by forest that once would have been home to many rhinos, and imagining that in my place at this very moment could be Borneo’s hairy, rugged rhino, I can’t help but feel that this is what extinction looks like. An unused rescue centre. Built as an opportunity for hope, but now standing as a monument to despair.
If no new male rhinos are found in Kalimantan, the death of Tam could spell the extinction of the Bornean subspecies (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni) of the Sumatran rhino–a creature that developed 300,000 years of genetic uniqueness on the world’s third largest island.
Jeremy Hance has done more than any other journalist to raise the international profile of the Sumatran rhino. In his column for Mongabay, written the day after Tam’s death, he tells of missed opportunities and how bureaucracy has hampered efforts to rescue the species from the brink.
He ends with this call to action:
Let’s not spend another decade squabbling while the remaining animals disappear. Let’s do something. Let’s stop with the missed opportunities and shrugged-off chances. Let’s put aside national differences and egos and work together.
These are the words that ring in my ears as I step out of a relic sanctuary that in decades to come will probably be swallowed by the forest.
Read more about the Sumatran Rhino:
1984: the meeting that changed everything for Sumatran rhinos ( Part 1 of a mindblowing 4 part series by Jeremy Hance).
Rare rhino’s death should light a fire under Indonesia
OTHER ARTICLES:
