Updates

Botswana 

Mombo Rhino baby # 8.  The reintroduced rhinos continue to amaze. At the end of November, our monitoring team set out to look for one female who had not been seen since parting company with her regular companion a few days earlier. Often this is a sign of an impending birth, and this in combination with her vast girth and general lethargy, suggested that another calf was on the way.

 

The clincher, though, was seeing a white stork in the road on the way to the area where the female rhino was believed to be. This beautiful bird had found its way to Mombo from southern Europe, storm-tossed across seas, and blown in sand-storms across deserts. European folklore has it that these birds deliver human babies, so why not a rhino baby?

 

Sure enough, that day the female rhino was spotted with a tiny male calf, born just four or five days earlier - as cute as a button! This was our eighth birth as a result of the Wilderness Safaris / SANParks / Botswana Government reintroduction program and means that almost a quarter of our white rhinos were born here, rather than being released from the boma's – a great achievement.