Late March 2008

By Bill Kunze, Pennsylvania State Director, The Nature Conservancy

Because it was the rainy season, a landscape that would normally look like a dry Martian scene of red rocks strewn across a dusty plain punctuated by volcanic hills had been transformed into a verdant paradise more reminiscent of Ireland. I may never have seen a more beautiful place in my life.

I know I’ve never been deeper into the wild than on a recent journey to Namibia, which was motivated by my desire to visit Africa for the first time and to see what kind of impact The Nature Conservancy is having in a very different part of the world.

Aridlands of Namibia

In the southwestern corner of Africa, Namibia is a primarily arid country the size of California, with a human population of only about two million. It offers critical habitat for desert-adapted versions of large mammals like elephants and lions as well as the endangered black rhino, in addition to legions of smaller mammals, birds, plants, and insects, many of which occur nowhere else on Earth.

“Rainy season” doesn’t mean “cool” here. March means the end of summer in the southern hemisphere, and the temperature regularly shot well past 1000F. But I was glad I had chosen this time of year to travel to southern Africa. I first spent a few days in the Namib Desert in western Namibia, the oldest desert on Earth. Now I was in the semi-desert a bit north and inland, and in addition to the unexpected green of “the wet” I was sharing the days not just with adult zebra and oryx and rhino but with their foals and calves as well.

In Search of Black Rhinos

From a total population of about 60,000 across Africa before 1960, rhinos were nearly hunted to extinction by the 1980s, primarily to supply horns to the Asian aphrodisiac trade. The poachers only took the horn; the rest of the animal was left on the ground to rot. Because of the efforts over the last twenty-five years of people like John Hendricks, a tracker for Conservancy partner Save the Rhino Trust, there are now about 200 black rhinos in the Kunene Region in northwestern Namibia, their last truly wild stronghold, and a few thousand others in various game parks across southern and eastern Africa.

The highlight of my Namibian journey was joining John and his tracking team in the field. You can see black rhino in other places, but in game parks they exist on our terms. Here in the Kunene, one of the last true wildernesses in Africa, I experienced them on their terms.

Rhinos don’t see very well, but they have very keen hearing and sense of smell. We zig-zagged on foot all over the land in order to stay downwind from them and otherwise avoid coming to their attention. As soon as one got wind of us, it moved off at a surprising clip. (These 1½-ton animals can gallop almost 30 miles per hour when they put their minds to it!)

But will the rhino survive? The poaching has largely been stopped, but what will happen to the millions of acres this improbable creature calls home? How can this wilderness continue to offer habitat for Africa’s unique large mammals, and serve as a key link in their vast migratory corridors, and meet the increasing demands of local communities anxious to improve their livelihoods?

Sounds like a job for The Nature Conservancy…

Our 2015 Goal commits us to work with others to double the amount of protected lands and waters around the world by 2015. This part of Namibia rises to the top of a global assessment of the most important aridlands to protect.

So, a year ago, in partnership with Save the Rhino Trust, Round River Conservation Studies, and the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism, The Nature Conservancy’s new Africa program began investing its resources and experience in this country. The goal of the partnership is to ensure the survival of this 2-million acre wilderness area and connect two existing national parks in a wildlife corridor of 15 million acres. Only conservation at this scale can preserve the long-range migratory paths of many of these animals, which can travel thousands of miles across the year in response to the cycle of wet and dry.

The Nature Conservancy has unmatched experience in bringing diverse stakeholders into partnership for the benefit of both nature and people – in this case, to craft a landscape that safeguards the habitat and migration needs of the black rhino and other animals as well as the cultural and economic needs of Namibian communities. The Conservancy is also able to bring financial resources to bear on this challenge in a way no other conservation organization can, and to catalyze commitments by government and local communities.

John Hendricks helped me understand how The Nature Conservancy can be most effective in this landscape that is new to us. The Conservancy brings tremendous scientific resources, powerful tools like landscape-scale conservation planning, and the ability to develop complex partnerships, but this knowledge is incomplete without John’s understanding of the rhino itself and its unique home.

He and his team spend hours every day tracking rhinos, observing their behavior, understanding where they go and why, all of which enables us together to design conservation that will actually work for the long term. We learn at least as much from John as he does from us.

And the black rhino helped me understand why we do this work. Later in my journey, after I left the Kunene, I spent a few days at a private game reserve on the edge of Namibia’s long-standing, fenced-in national game park. There, it was easy to see animals – in fact, we sometimes had to honk the horn to move them off the road in front of us. At one point, we drove right up to a white rhino and her calf, and I had to take my long lens off my camera in order to get the picture. Compare that to my earlier experience with the black rhino.

One of these animals lives in the wilderness. The other lives in a carefully managed game park. The black rhino taught me something about what it is to be free.

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Bill Kunze/TNC (Aridlands of Namibia); Photo © Perri Strawn/TNC (Bill in Namibia); Photo © Bill Kunze/TNC (Black rhino in Namibia).