Indonesia: The Fierce Urgency of Saving Asia’s Endangered Rhinos

Diana Parker Jakarta Globe 15 Nov 13;

Indonesia’s rhinos are in crisis.

The one-horned Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus), which once ranged through South and Southeast Asia, is now extinct in all but one rare lowland forest in western Java, specifically the Ujung Kulon National Park in Banten.

With only around 50 individuals left in the wild — and none in captivity — the Javan rhino is one of the world’s most endangered large animals.

And the furry, two-horned Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) — the world’s smallest rhino species but still weighing in at an impressive 600-950 kilograms — is not doing much better.

There may be just 100 Sumatran rhinos left worldwide, a figure announced at the Sumatran Rhino Crisis Summit, an emergency meeting held in Singapore from March 31-April 4. At the summit, rhino experts and conservationists convened with government officials to discuss the dire situation facing the Sumatran rhino and the steps needed to protect it from extinction.

The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia, the only two countries that can still boast Sumatran rhino populations, vowed at the summit to work together to protect the species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global conservation network that organized the summit, called the agreement “groundbreaking” in a media release in April.

However, conservationists warned, governments still needed to take concrete action to save the species.

“Serious steps must be taken to roll back the tide of extinction of the Sumatran rhino,” Widodo Ramono, director of the Indonesian Rhino Foundation (YABI), said in the IUCN release.

“We need to act together urgently, hand in hand, replicating some of the inspirational successes of other conservation efforts and aim to stop any failures that might impede progress.”

Fast forward nearly six months and Widodo was in Way Kambas National Park in Lampung, attending a workshop together with local and international conservationists and rangers from across Indonesia who are working to protect rhinos on the ground.

The goal of the workshop was to take one simple but critical step toward protecting Sumatran rhinos — figuring out exactly how many rhinos are left in the wild and where.

“We are looking for something that can’t be seen. It’s invisible. So we must search for a method to use to study what can’t be seen directly,” Widodo said in Way Kambas on Sept. 27.

Keeping track

Sumatran rhinos are notoriously shy. Even for rangers who spend years tracking and protecting the animal, actual sightings of the rhino are rare. So how does one count and keep safe an animal that can’t been seen?

One answer: set a trap — a camera trap. According to Sunarto, a species specialist at WWF Indonesia, the first camera trap used in Indonesia was nothing more than a traditional film camera hooked up to a pressure pad. When a large animal like a rhino would walk across the pad, it would trigger the camera to snap a photo, “capturing” the animal on film.

Today’s camera traps are much more sophisticated, and scientists all over the world use these specially made digital cameras to take still photos and videos of rare animals. At the workshop, rangers from various rhino habitat sites in Indonesia trekked through the forest for a demonstration on how to install and use the traps.

Although some sites are already using camera traps to track and study Sumatran and Javan rhinos, conservationists hope that more widespread, systematic use of the traps will help them get a more complete picture of just how many are left.

Another answer that is perhaps even more surprising is DNA sampling. Each individual rhino’s DNA is unique, so testing DNA can help scientists learn how many rhinos are living in a particular area — for which rangers turn to poop.

During treks through rhino territory they search for droppings, and if they are lucky enough to find fresh feces, they collect a small sample. These samples are brought back to a lab, the DNA is analyzed, and scientists can then determine which specific rhino the feces sample came from.

“We hope that with this kind of survey [using camera traps and DNA sampling], later on, we will find that we can actually approach [in our estimates] the actual number of rhinos,” Widodo said.

“And then, after that, we will be able to count what the increase may be.”

While the Crisis Summit estimated there may be fewer than 100 Sumatran rhinos left in the world, other figures put that number closer to 200, scattered throughout Way Kambas and Bukit Barisan Selatan national parks in Lampung and the Leuser Ecosystem in Aceh and North Sumatra, as well as a small community in Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo.

On Oct. 2, WWF Indonesia released camera trap photos and video of what may be a lone Sumatran rhino in the jungles of East Kalimantan, a surprising find since rhinos had long been considered extinct in Indonesian Borneo. But while work still needs to be done to count the exact number left, workshop participants agreed that without better protection, Sumatran rhinos were at serious risk of becoming extinct.

In the past 20 years alone, WWF Indonesia estimates Sumatran rhino numbers have declined by 82 percent, with rhinos going extinct at eight habitat sites. Habitat fragmentation and encroachment are two of the major threats facing the species, both unsurprising given the high deforestation rates in Sumatra over past two decades.

But according to many conference participants, poaching is currently the most serious threat facing the remaining wild rhinos.

Although other endangered animals such as elephants and orangutans are sometimes killed in Indonesia because they are perceived as a threat to farms or plantations, rhinos are killed almost exclusively for their horns, which can fetch huge sums on the black market.

Although there is no scientific evidence that rhino horns have any medical properties (the horns are made mostly of keratin, like human fingernails), it remains a sought-after ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, and demand for the horns in countries like China and Vietnam has led to thousands of rhinos being killed across Africa and Asia in recent years.

The threat is so serious that even the announcement that at least one rhino still exists in Kalimantan was criticized by some researchers, who fear publicizing the existence of the rhino will draw the attention of poachers.

“What WWF should have done is keep quiet, lobby in the background for the protection of the forest and the establishment of effective conservation management,” Erik Meijaard, a researcher who has worked in Indonesia for more than 20 years, told conservation news website Mongabay.com in an Oct. 9 article, after WWF released the photos and video footage of the rhino.

Possibilities

WWF Indonesia and the local government of East Kalimantan’s West Kutai district have already set up a joint monitoring team that has been conducting regular patrols in the area to help protect the rhino from poachers.

But according to Meijaard, the measure isn’t enough.

“The problem is that no one in Indonesia, apart possibly from the Ujung Kulon people, have been able to stop rhino poaching,” he said.

In Way Kambas, workshop participants, including experts from WWF, also stressed the need for more and better patrols to protect Sumatran rhinos.

“The most urgent [step] will be protection of the places where we definitely know there are rhinos. Because there are many places that do not have adequate protection,” Sunarto told the Jakarta Globe during the workshop.

“You have to have the almost 24-hour presence of a good team. A team that can prevent, to begin with, the poachers from coming in. And if they detect one, they should be able to handle it and prevent [the poacher] from killing the rhinos.”

Sunarto said it was not difficult to get people in Indonesia to support rhino conservation, including among communities living near rhino habitats, arguably some of the most critical supporters of conservation efforts.

“But the thing is, with rhino conservation, even if you have a village where 99 percent of the people support [it], if you have one person, with one gun, that can wipe out the rhino,” Sunarto said.

But there have been success stories for rhinos in Asia. In Nepal and India, greater one-horned rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) populations have been able to bounce back with serious anti-poaching efforts.

Indonesia also has its own rhino success story. While the Javan rhino is still critically endangered, 40 years ago it would have been hard to predict that even 50 would survive in Ujung Kulon. In the 1960s and 1970s, the species was holding on by a thread with only around 25 individuals left in the wild.

But after serious protection measures were put in place, including patrols by special privately funded forest ranger teams know as Rhino Protection Units (RPUs), the Javan rhinos began to make a comeback. Now, the population appears to have stabilized at around 40 or 50 individuals.

There have been some indications that the Indonesian government is starting to get serious about Sumatran rhino conservation. On Oct. 2-3, Indonesia convened the first ever Asian Rhino Range States Meeting in Bandar Lampung.

At the ministerial-level meeting, representatives from Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal agreed that just maintaining the populations would not be enough. Steps need to be taken to help rhinos recover.

In a press release, WWF Indonesia applauded the meeting, but said it would take more than words to make this a reality. Proven techniques from places like Ujung Kulon must be implemented throughout the region.

“The rhino, it is a magnificent animal,” Sunarto said. “And we still manage to have two species, which is so special.

“Our effort has to be successful. Everyone will watch us. Everyone will hope for us. The rhino conservation is in our hands now. We don’t want to lose in this battle.”