Serengeti: The Struggle to Save the Rhino!

News that the world’s last male northern white rhino died earlier this year in Sudan made world headlines. But the story of saving Africa’s rhinos has not been a uniformly sad story: many organizations and charities have done great work over the last decade to save some of the planet’s most beautiful and exotic species. One case in point is Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, where a poaching onslaught in the 1980s made park staff believe they had lost the last of the species.

But thanks to a program by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Nduna Foundation and the Wildlife Without Borders program of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, dozens of rare eastern black rhinos have been returned to the Park’s borders to reproduce and flourish.  According to program coordinator Michelle Gadd, “The Serengeti Rhino Repatriation Project is an unprecedented collaboration among African nations and the United States of America for the good of conservation.”

Black rhino numbers have plummeted worldwide over the last 100 years due to poaching and other environmental factors. Today that figure stands at 2,300. Hence park staff are increasing security to protect against poachers and make