Rhinoceros – Roumazeilles.net

Rhinoceros

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 13:48:18 +0000

A rhino mother and her calf as seen from the road in Hluwluwe Park, South Africa, August 2015.

Black rhinoceros

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:42:31 +0000

This is true that I wanted to meet black rhinos when visiting the Ngorongoro crater. This is one of the few places where you can see them in the wild and of the rares locations where they are protected against near certain extinction in the short term. But I did not expect to only find black rhinoceros in the mid-day sun (at the hottest time, when the air is vibrating and pulsating from the heat convection; When the sun is so vertical that all animals are heavily marked with treacherous shadows that any photographer would hate).

So, even if the distance was horrendously long, the air agitated with illusions like in the hottest desert, I decided to snap a few shots anyway. I knew that the image would not have a good quality and that it would be strongly deformed. But I would not have dreamed of getting this watercolor painting kind of effect without using Photoshop. A painted rhino…

Ngorongoro, Tanzania – Black rhinoceros

A few lessons for the photographer:

Always keep your camera with you.
Do not stop shooting because it’s difficult; It may be time to experiment new things.
Never delete “failed pictures” just from what you see on the rear LCD of the camera (I could only see disgustingly fuzzy pictures).

Black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis, Rhinocéros noir).
Tanzania, Ngorongoro Conservancy Area, March 2013.

Rhinos fly the chopper

Yves Roumazeilles — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:41:30 +0000

The WWF has a wide Black Rhino Range Expansion Project which is trying to ensure a better future for the Black Rhinoceros species. They are under a severe threat because their horn is considered as the source of a powerful medicinal drug in several cultures. The black rhino is protected and poaching is slowly reducing (but it is difficult to know for sure whether the last remaining wild animals will be able to maintain long enough to restore a stable population).

In some countries (like in Botswana), the protection institutions have included radio chips in the horns of wild animals to -at least- be able to catch quickly any poacher even when they left the National Parks and are in big cities (and this has been the reason for quite some bad surprises to some poachers: Botswana laws lead to 15 years in prison in this case).

The WWF is trying something different: Taking some animals from a location where there are a little more wild animals and moving them to an habitat where they have disappeared. In this case, moving the from South Africa Eastern Cape to Limpopo Province, about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) away.

This gave photographers a unique occasion to shoot unusual pictures:

Photographs courtesy Green Renaissance/WWF.

Masai Mara Safari Camp

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:42:27 +0000