The One-Horned Javan Rhinoceros Daces Extinction
The one-horned Javan rhinoceros is only found in Ujung Kulon National Park in West Java. As late as the 1880s, thousands of these animals roamed all over the island of Java. Then the colonial Dutch government put a bounty on them to rid the island of these pests. In just forty years, the rhino faced extinction on Java. The Dutch then created the Ujung Kulon Wildlife Reserve in 1921 on the southwestern tip of the island to give the remaining animals a chance to survive. The reserve became a national park in 1981. This animal is extremely rare, with just forty to fifty remaining in the wild. Despite their size, Javan rhinos move quickly and quietly through tangles of vines and thick walls of jungle shrubs. By lowering their heads, the animals move like huge wedges that push the undergrowth up and over their backs as they plow through the thick vegetation. In 1990, the World Wildlife Fund pioneered what has become a common photo-trapping technique in Ujung Kulon National Park to determine how many of these animals remained in the wild. They set up several hidden cameras along rhino trails. Each camera was set to automatically trigger when an animal approached and stepped on a pressure-sensitive mat that was hidden under a thin layer of dirt on the trail. When an animal stepped on the mat, its weight triggered the camera to take its picture. After 576 rolls of film and twenty thousand snapshots, they had a good census of all the animals living in Ujung Kulon, including black and spotted leopards, wild dogs, wild buffalo, deer, and peacocks. They also got many shots of the rhinos. After studying the physical markings of all the rhinos in the photos, including scars, horns, height, and other unique attributes, the scientists estimated that there were forty-six of these rhinos still alive in Ujung Kulon at that point. It is not known if that number has gone up or down since the census.
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