Thursday 29 May 2008

But the success was not without incident as, after a short inspection, the rhino mother - one of only 60 Javan rhinos left in the wild - charged the camera and sent it flying.

The critically-endangered Javan rhinos are found only in Indonesia's Ujung Kulon National Park, where the video was recorded, and in one other park in Vietnam.



Insights into animal behaviour
The use of video traps is providing valuable insights into the behaviour of rhinos and other animals, which will aid in their conservation.

"It's very unusual to catch a glimpse of the Javan rhinos deep inside the rainforest," said Adhi Rachmat Hariyadi, site manager of WWF-Indonesia's project in Ujung Kulon National Park. "The motion-triggered infrared video traps are a useful way to observe them and the ways they use their habitat in a more detailed way."

These recordings of the Javan rhino are the highlight so far of the installation in recent months of improved video-based wildlife recording equipment. This type of equipment has already proved successful with rare Malayan tigers in Malaysia and a Sumatran rhino in Borneo.

"Setting cameras such as these is always a challenge, especially with animals as rare and elusive as the Javan rhino," said WWF Malaysia photographer Stephen Hogg, who designed the video traps.

"The assault on the camera still has us baffled because we specifically use infrared lights as the source of illumination when we designed and built these units so as to not scare animals away when the camera activates," he explained.

The new ground-level video traps for the Javan rhino are a significant improvement on the previous viewing arrangements, which involved constructing wooden viewing platforms nearly 10m off the ground at wallowing sites. The platforms were difficult and time-consuming to construct, required safety training and precautions for users and offered limited viewing angles. It was often impossible to identify particular rhinos because they were so far away from the animals.