Endangered Sumatran rhino rediscovery in Indonesian Borneo

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This video says about itself:

A rhino love story by David Attenborough

Jan 31, 2013

This piece is from the Natural World Special film: Attenborough’s Ark, where David Attenborough considers 10 unusual species he would like to save from extinction.

Number two on the list is the smallest of the rhino family, the Sumatran Rhino – critically endangered with numbers in the wild estimated around 200. We filmed the efforts of a Sumatran conservation rebreeding programme, who in June 2012 successfully bred the first ever captive born Sumatran Rhino in Sumatra. This is their story.

From Wildlife Extra:

Critically Endangered Sumatran Rhino rediscovered in Indonesian Borneo

WWF team find footprints of rhinos on Borneo

March 2013. A WWF team on the island of Borneo to monitor [the] Orang-utan population have discovered what they believe to be the footprints of a critically endangered Sumatran rhinoceros, where it was believed that the rhino had been extinct for some time.

The WWF staff were monitoring a population of orang-utans in West Kutai district of East Kalimantan. Having discovered the footprints, they conducted a further survey of the area along with government forestry officials and scientists from a local university. The survey discovered further footprints, and some horn scratches at mud holes, as well as trees used as rubbing posts and bite marks on plants, raising the possibility that there may be more than one lone animal, though numbers remain unclear.

The Sumatran rhino was believed to have been extinct in Indonesian Borneo since the 1990s; and fewer than 200 animals exist anywhere in the world in the wild, still living in the wild in Indonesia and Malaysia.

According to the WWF: Current population & distribution

The Borneo Sumatran rhino is now possibly extinct in Sarawak (Malaysia) and Kalimantan (Indonesia), with perhaps fewer than 25 surviving in Sabah (Malaysia). A 2005 survey in the interior of Sabah found evidence of at least 13 rhinos, and scattered individuals are found in other parts of the state.

Read more about the Sumatran rhino on the WWF website.

Indonesian and Malaysian governments agree to work together to save Sumatran rhino: here.

July 2013. “Harapan,” a six-year-old male Sumatran rhino born at the Cincinnati Zoo in 2007 and later moved zoos in Florida and Los Angeles Zoo, was returned to Cincinnati in July in an effort to help save his rapidly disappearing species from extinction. With no more than 100 Sumatran rhinos left on the planet and only two in the USA (Harapan and his sister, nine-year-old “Suci”), this move demonstrates just how desperate the effort to save this species has become: here.

Talking about Indonesian Borneo: March 2013. Pulp timber suppliers to controversial paper giant Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) are continuing to log tropical forest and dig drainage canals through peat soils in Kalimantan, regardless of the new Forest Conservation Policy (FCP) launched with much fanfare by APP and parent group Sinar Mas last month: here.

A proposed coal road through the Harapan Rainforest in Sumatra could undo almost a decade of good work by the BirdLife Partnership, acting with the support of the Indonesian Government: here.

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