Last Chance to See. Mark Carwardine

white tends to hold its head a little higher than its southern counterpart, and its body proportions are slightly different, but that’s just splitting hairs.

      ‘The northern white rhino is basically the southern white rhino with a different accent,’ as Stephen put it. True, but it’s a little more than that – their genetic differences are sufficiently great for them to be considered biologically separate.

      Millions of people have died in the DRC, and many more have been displaced from their homes.

      One thing you’ll notice about both white rhinos is that they’re not actually white. A rhino will often be roughly the same colour as the local soil (it rolls around in it a lot), but even if you were to put one through a car wash it still wouldn’t be white. It wouldn’t even be stone white, or champagne white, or whatever else paint manufacturers call every possible shade of off-white. It’s more of a dull grey-brown colour.

      Despite what you might think, this isn’t because zoologists are either colour-blind or stupid. It’s because they are illiterate. It comes from a mistranslation of the Dutch word ‘wijde’, which means ‘wide’ and refers to the rhino’s mouth. This was misread as the Afrikaans word ‘wit’, which means ‘white’. And so the wide-mouthed rhino became the white rhino.

      No one has a clue if this is actually true or not, incidentally, but it’s a good story and gets told around campfires the length and breadth of Africa almost every night.

      What we do know is that the white rhino’s mouth is, indeed, wide. It is designed for grazing, for eating short grass, whereas its African cousin, the black rhino, has a prehensile upper lip designed for browsing. The white rhino is like a lawnmower, the black rhino is like a pair of secateurs, and their lips are the best way to tell them apart.

      Now, the white rhino is a bit of a paradox, because it is both the rarest and the commonest of all the world’s rhinos. The two subspecies have had very different fortunes. The northerner set up home in the crossfire of a war zone – giving some credibility to the saying ‘It’s grim up north’ – while the southerner settled for a relatively easier life hiding from hunters and poachers, rather than dodging rebels’ bullets.

      When the southern white rhino was first described by western scientists, in 1817, it was incredibly common. Lots of explorers and travellers wandering around Africa at the time were so impressed by its commonness they made a point of writing about it. But the good times came to an abrupt end pretty quickly. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, were killed by sports hunters, poachers and even the early explorers themselves. By the 1880s, conservationists feared the worst.

       But a tiny population survived by hiding in a remote corner of Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve, which is north of Durban in South Africa. All the stops were pulled out to protect these last few survivors – perhaps a couple of dozen animals altogether – and the southern white rhino became one of the greatest conservation success stories of all time.

      There are now more than 17,480 southern whites in the wild in Africa, and another 750 or so in captivity around the world. This is nowhere near as many as there once were, of course, but at least now they are out of immediate danger. It just shows what can be achieved with a good plan, political will, dedicated people on the ground, and plenty of money.

      But there is a slight catch. Part of the conservation plan includes trophy hunting. Under government licence, hunters have been allowed to shoot a small number of elderly male rhinos – for a hefty price – every year since the late 1960s.

      One thing you’ll notice about both the northern white rhino (above) and the southern white rhino (below) is that they’re not actually white. They still wouldn’t be white even if you put them through a car wash.

      Could you imagine killing a southern white rhino for fun? Lots of people do.

      It sounds ridiculous, shooting an animal you are trying to protect, but there’s no denying that it has worked. By raising desperately needed funds and giving local communities (and landowners – many of the rhinos are on private land) an incentive to look after them, trophy hunting has played an important role in southern white rhino conservation.

      Never in a million years could I shoot a rhino myself – or begin to understand the mentality of the people who do. I couldn’t even wring the neck of a dying, one-legged chicken. But I try to be realistic and, begrudgingly, I do agree with most conservation groups that trophy hunting has been a necessary evil in saving the southern white rhino from extinction (assuming, of course, that the hunting is properly managed, the population is large enough and the profits are injected back into conservation efforts).

      Killing individual animals for the greater good of the species is a tough call, but in some cases there is no alternative. Unfortunately, making wildlife pay for itself is sometimes the only way to make most people consider it worth saving.

      Stephen arrived in Africa in customary style. When his plane came in to land at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, as soon as the wheels hit the ground the brakes screeched and he was thrown forward into the headrest of the seat in front (actually, I’m probably exaggerating – in First Class, apparently, the headrest of the seat in front would have been too far away for him to make physical contact).

      Anyway, his plane made a squealing, swervy landing.

      ‘Sorry about that,’ said the pilot, after he’d wrestled back control of his Boeing 777. ‘There was an aardvark on the runway and I didn’t want to hurt it.’

      There is something rather special about stepping out of a plane onto African soil. Anyone who has done it will know what I mean. There is a particular smell, a sense of anticipation and an overwhelming feeling of space. Douglas Adams described his first impression perfectly: ‘The sky over Kenya is simply much bigger than it is anywhere else.’

      We were in East Africa to visit Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a non-profit rhino sanctuary in the shadow of Mount Kenya and a few hours’ drive from Nairobi. The rhinos in this 36,500-hectare (90,000-acre) fenced enclosure are protected round-the-clock. Anti-poaching patrols aim to see each individual (there were 78 black rhinos and nine white rhinos at the time of our visit) at least once every four or five days. If one goes missing, reinforcements – more rangers, a surveillance aircraft and even two bloodhounds – are brought in to step up the search until the disappearing perissodactyl is found.

      More importantly, Ol Pej, as it’s called by the locals, had been preparing itself for a small party of northern white rhinos. The original plan was to evacuate the last survivors from the war zone in Garamba National Park and put them into this rhino health farm for safe-keeping. The plan has since changed, but more of that later.

      First we had an appointment to see a southern white rhino, to get Stephen in the mood.

      The southern white rhino wouldn’t look out of place wandering alongside a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger.

      With the help of Batian Craig, the Wildlife and Security Manager, we found one fairly quickly. We stopped the car and cut the engine to look at it properly through binoculars. It was busy feeding and had its back to us. It seemed a little incongruous for such a monstrously huge animal to be doing such a gentle activity as grazing, rather like watching a road digger doing a bit of weeding.

      Very slowly, Batian opened the driver’s door.