Baby Rhinos, Bitter Tears

The best adjective I can use on the southern white rhino's personality is "doglike." These animals wanted some love from us. We were happy to oblige.

They are warm, solid animals. Even the horn, which is made from fused hair, is warm. Everything about them is warm--their hearts and their soft-concrete skin. And inside the folds of their skin it is soft as silk.

The rhino's horn has long been thought in Asia to have medicinal properties; powdered down, it was the Viagra of the early 20th century. In addition, ceremonial sword hilts, much in demand in the Middle East, were carved from rhino horn (mostly that of black rhinos). In South Africa, southern white rhinos have been terribly persecuted by farmers and trophy hunters. They very nearly vanished by the beginning of the 20th century--down to less than 200 animals. 

The Wilds' beautiful bull rhino. Think what his horn is worth to heartless mercenaries. $65,000.00 per kilo is the current going rate.

Concerted efforts to breed them in captivity and protect the remaining animals (anyone else remember the National Geographic photos of rhinos, each with its own personal armed guard?) allowed them to rebound. The world population peaked around 20,000, 80% of which live in South Africa. There are now more individual southern whites than there are individuals of all other rhino species combined. But the game has abruptly changed, and we may never see that peak again.

Poachers still take them, now at a rate of

  ONE RHINO EVERY DAY

 despite the fact that almost all extant rhinos live in protected parks and game reserves. Living in a park does you no good when poachers are about. Rhino poaching is escalating at a horrifying rate in South Africa, the last stronghold for the southern white rhino.

This site  has detailed information on the increased demand for medicinally worthless powdered rhino horn in Asian markets, which is leading to a huge spike in rhino deaths. Three hundred thirty-three rhinos were slaughtered in 2010. This sickening number went up again in 2011. Despite the presence of 500 wardens in South Africa's Kruger National Park,  over half of the 448 rhinos killed were in the park. Already in January 2012, poachers have brutally slaughtered eleven animals, putting 2012 on track to be the worst year for rhinos ever in South Africa. I have seen rhinos browsing happily in Kruger Park, when poaching was a distant and unwelcome memory, and knowing this is happening again makes my stomach turn over.

In addition to the slaughter of white rhinos, 19 critically endangered black rhinos were killed in 2011, eight in Kruger Park alone. Poachers use high powered rifles and veterinary tranquilizers to dart rhinos before hacking off their horns. I watched a video of a rhino who woke up without his face, and that image will stay with me for life.

If you have ever laid a hand on a rhinoceros' kind head, scratching him around the ears and his big weepy eyes, knowing this should make you weep. Perhaps it does anyway. Is there no end to human greed and selfishness? Is there no end to the gullibility of people who believe in folkloric cures that must, oddly enough, be made from endangered species' odd parts, like tiger penises and rhino horns? (The more expensive it is, the better it must be!) The fable du jour driving this obscene slaughter is that powdered rhino horn (news flash!!) now not only enhances male potency but also cures cancer. So let's wipe out the rhinoceros, just eating their hair.  

I'm sorry. I am crying and spitting bullets at the same time, and that's not a good thing. But there is more to life than pecking at a computer, enjoying cute and cuddly animals. There is seeing that they survive into tomorrow.

If you would like to help:

See the International Rhino Foundation web site, which is working directly with South African authorities to supply antipoaching patrols with the funds and manpower they must have to make a difference.

This is Anan, a southern white rhino. This photo was taken a couple of years ago at The Wilds. In the interim, she's grown up into one of the adorable yearlings pictured above. 

May she live to see a world where people have finally realized that her hair is not medicine. Where she will be treasured, alive and running around on her spring-loaded feet, for the priceless gift she is.

Extreme Rhino Love

January 14, 2012 was the Ohio Ornithological Society's annual Winter Raptor Extravaganza at The Wilds, a 10,000 acre conservation breeding and research facility about an hour north of us near Caldwell, Ohio. It's the largest such facility in the world. Here. In Appalachian Ohio.  Breeding southern white rhinos better than anybody else. Can you hear my buttons busting?

Baby charges!! Eek!! The crowd scatters!

One of the supercool things The Wilds' staff does when we come to bird there is to let us into the rhino barn, where these tropical animals spend cold winter days. (They let them out to gallop around on mild days).

Lovely Tricia West gets her hands on a southern white rhino. Everyone was transformed by the nearness of these incredibly gentle and kind animals. Such smiles lit up the barn!

Some people commented on the smell, a horsy odor with strong notes of pig.

Some people never took their fingers off their pinched noses. But she loved every minute, anyway.

And one person (and I ain't sayin' who) got right down there and scored three wet rhinokisses. Real kisses, right on the soft muzzle. While other people kept their noses pinched. That person, the one who got the kisses, also did not shower until the next afternoon. Because she actually likes the scent of rhino in her hair. Please note the wet elbow of the parka, courtesy a couple of mouthy Asian one-horned rhinos. 

The January visit is perfectly timed for rhinobabehs. This year, there were THREE. 

A more winsome little animal would be hard to find, with its big swivelly aardvark ears, its gentle eyes and its rubbery padded feet. 

Rhinobabies are quite frisky and easily excited. They bog their heads and suddenly wheel around to run! And then they come back to be loved on again. My babehs were in love

immediately. They leapt at the chance to come back to bird The Wilds and commune with rhinos once again.

We got to see a baby southern white rhino stop running around long enough to nurse.

Let's zoom in on that sweetness. Yes, they're mammals underneath all that armor, with a nice little udder and the sweetest mouths.

The bond between mother an baby is profound. This mama was a little jealous of her baby...she wanted all the attention herself! She kept holding the baby back with her horn, then hurrying up to be petted.

She knew she'd been upstaged. Oh, I know the feeling!

My wonderful partner in Science Club, Mrs. Hendrix. She shows the kids new and wonderful things every Wednesday afternoon. Every bit as big an animal freak as The Science Chimp. We both would like to work full-time in the rhino barn.

This yearling was a little babe last year, and obviously remembered being petted by many birders at once. It wanted more.

More, more, more said the baby.

One of this year's new calves flopped down and presented its belly to Daniel, who was only too happy to give it a rubdown.

Mrs. Hendrix loves rhinos almost best of all. She would like to work here. Instead she is one of Liam's most awesome teachers, something we are very happy about.

Daniel came and got us and Liam and I moved in on his cuddly rhino babeh action.

Really, it was all we could do not to crawl right through the steel bars. Wherever you are, happy Valentine's Day!

Swans in the Snow

At the Ohio Ornithological Society's Winter Raptor Extravaganza at The Wilds, January 14, we found a red-tailed hawk feeding on a roadkilled whitetail. It was loath to leave its food source, and gave us a beautiful look from our auto caravan.

Finally the tension was too much and it took off, flashing its best field mark.

The day was filled with such moments. One of my very favorite sights was trumpeter swans against the smoky blue hills of this reclaimed strip mine.

I really love being a photographer. In fact, it's the best thing that has ever happened to my aesthetic sense. When you are used to documenting what you see, you become highly sensitized to what's beautiful. To light in all its moods. To composition. You're constantly composing the next shot.

These swans nearly brought me to my knees. I was so, so happy they lacked plastic neck bands. Because not only would that have ruined my photo, but their naked state meant they might be the offspring of captive-bred birds. Truly wild. Truly ours, Ohio-bred..

I wheeled as they went over, snapping madly away.

I love a white bird against a dark sky.

Especially wild trumpeter swans against a dark Ohio sky.

Trumpeter Swans in Ohio

SWANS! Wild swans! But not just any wild swans--these are trumpeter swans!

Y'all know how I love hayrolls. There are plenty of them at The Wilds.

But there's something else there besides hayrolls. For one thing, there are northern harriers coursing low over the meadows.

There are expressive sweeps of brush and field, with hayrolls for punctuation.

And there are trumpeter swans at The Wilds.

I did not know that the trumpeter swan is the largest waterfowl species in the world. Heaviest and largest. Wow! Seventy-two inches long, weighing up to 30 pounds, with a eight-foot wingspan?!? Holy cow.

It will probably not surprise you to know that by the early 20th century the trumpeter swan was all but extinct throughout its North American range. A bird that big, with fabulous down feathers for clothing, and edible too--well, reason enough to wipe it out. You know those white muffs that stylish ladies warmed their hands in? Trumpeter swan skins. Yuck. Quill pens? Made from the wing feathers of trumpeter swans. A high use for a vanishing bird. By 1900, they persisted only in Alaska and very remote parts of the western US.  Where we couldn't get to them, basically.

Captive breeding efforts began in the early 1900's, with limited success. In 1982 the Toronto Zoo figured out how to captive-raise trumpeter swans, releasing over 180 into the wild, and many other institutions have followed their lead. Ohio got in the act in 1996. 150 birds were released at Magee Marsh, that mecca for warbler lovers on Lake Erie. Zoos and aviculturists contributed young swans to a swan conservation program at The Wilds, and these birds were augmented with eggs from wild nests in Alaska. Cleveland Metroparks Zoo hatched the eggs and kept the cygnets until they were three months old, and then they were sent to The Wilds in groups of 10-15.

Release sites are carefully selected for quality and forage.


 The Wilds has a bunch of swans still hanging around. What I really love is seeing birds without big colored plastic neckbands. I'm guessing that they're the offspring of captive-reared birds. In Ohio, trumpeter swans can be seen at Magee Marsh in Ottawa Co., Mallard Club in Lucas Co., Pickerel Creek in Sandusky Co., Mosquito Creek and Grand River in Trumbull Co., Killbuck Marsh in Wayne CO, and Killdeer Plains in Wyandot Co.  Cedar Point NWR also has released trumpeters.

These birds tend not to migrate, but to travel around just enough to find open water and something to eat (submerged aquatic vegetation, mostly).

We were incredibly lucky to find the water still open at The Wilds on this Sunday, January 14. By the next morning, all the ponds would have frozen over, sending the swans elsewhere.

This sign always makes me smile and think of my dad, Dale Zickefoose. He always wanted to live in the country again (he was born and raised on a farm in Iowa.)

We were lucky enough to see some trumpeter swans take off from a distant lake.

I was mesmerized by their beauty. A 20-30 pound swan has to run over the water for a long time before it can become airborne.

Their great webbed feet leave splashtracks everywhere.

They also make quite a racket as they lift off.

Finally, they were airborne, their great clean wings slicing the air instead of slapping the water.

And as they flew against the snow-dusted hills, they simply vanished from sight.

Which we hope they will never do again in Ohio, or anywhere else. 

This is a thank-you to all those wildlife biologists and zoo personnel who have worked so hard to give us a sight like that. A thank-you to The Wilds for its big part in bringing this miraculous bird back to our skies and eyes. They're on Facebook, too. Aren't we all? (Yes, Mether, we are. Or at least I am).

Short-eared Owl Afternoon

 I love the Ohio Ornithological Society's annual Raptor Extravaganza at The Wilds each January. It's a way to get together with friends in a lovely setting and collectively freeze your kiesters off. Together. It's a bonding thing.

Phoebe and Liam dine on fresh snow while we pound a pine grove for roosting owls.  I love taking our kids on this trip each year. Together, they're a unit of contentment, happy to look at what we show them in the scope, but equally happy to just be in The Wilds.

There are other kids who come, too; this one too little to stick up above the Lespedeza.

Part of The Whipple Bird Club. We were missing Shila, but Marcy's smile made up for it.

I forget what Mrs. Claus is supposed to be doing if it's snowing when the sun is shining. Do you remember, Steve?

Maybe best not to ask. Carol (right) obviously didn't get the memo that it was Dorky Hat Day. Shhh. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. Steve and Mawcy are wooking fow wabbits.

I like to shoot pictures of people out birding. Dave looked great in the taupeness with the sunny snowflakes drifting down.

We feel so lucky to have a place like The Wilds less than an hour from our house. A place where you can see for miles and scan for raptors. It's hard to do that at home. Too many trees. 

No such problem here. You see, when the place was strip-mined in the '70's, they took away the soil that could support trees. The subsoil that's left makes stunted, twisted little things that look more like shrubs. So it's going to be open land for the foreseeable future. 

Which is a great thing for short-eared owls. SEOW's come here from the far north, and only in winter (though a few have tried nesting each year). They're looking for voles and mice. It looked to us like a great vole year at The Wilds, with dark little sausage-shaped food packets skittering to and fro on the snowy paths before us as we walked. Their tunnels and tracks were everywhere! That spells a fat winter for owls.

Largely crepuscular, a short-ear has no fear of flying during the daylight. They're tough birds. We accidentally spooked this gentleman from his ground roost right by the road and up he started with the classic mechanical mothlike wingbeats that quicken a birder's heart.

 Phoebe spotted him right away and she and I tried very hard to get a line of five slowly moving cars stuffed with birders to stop and see this wonder of the north. Everybody saw it well! I must've yelled SHORTEAR SHORTEAR SHORTEAR a dozen times.

Phoebe made a mental note of where she'd seen him start up and went over to ground-truth her suspicion.

 She found the spot and lo! there was a puddle of fresh shortear poo where he'd been sleeping.

and she was not ashamed to be very excited to have found that

which warmed her mama's heart.

Speaking of warm hearts, Liam spent the entire day with Savannah, his sixth-grade teacher's daughter, playing and talking and acting goofy.

 Savannah thinks Liam hung the moon, with good reason. He is unfailingly patient and kind to small children and they adore him for that. 

It helps that Savannah is purely adorable.

She brings out the caretaker in him.

 After everyone had finished high-fiving, the ones for whom short-eared owl was a life bird did the Life Bird Wiggle. This is mandatory if Bill of the Birds is around.

We felt blessed to see about a dozen of these beautiful owls, more and more as night fell.

Same shot, but cropped so you can see the fabulous rufous wing patches and something of its face.

There's nothing quite like showing people their first flying owl. It's been an owly winter for us!