Follow the Footprints

摘要

For endangered black rhinos, which roam in small pockets across southern and western Africa, radio collars have been the technology du jour. But in the 1990s, a wife-husband team tracking this endangered species decided collars just weren't the way togo. "You'd be looking for an animal, and sometimes you'd lose the signal, and you wouldn't know if the collar had dropped off or if it was still on," says Zoe Jewell, who with her husband, Sky Alibhai, runs an organization based in Portugal called WildTrack. The pair would occasionally find rhinos whose efforts to remove the collars broke the radio transmitters and left the animals with deep lacerations in their necks. "It made us wonder how many rhinos were walking around with collars cutting into them, not working," Jewell says. In 2001, they reported that within a year of fitting 61 rhinos with radio collars, the equipment had failed for 73% of males and 44% of females.