Rare Zoo-Born Rhino Returns To Land Of Ancestors
Date: 21-Feb-07
Country: INDONESIA
Andalas had set off from the Los Angeles zoo for the 40-hour journey that took him via Amsterdam to the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, where he landed on Tuesday evening.
High-ranking Indonesian officials, including the forestry minister, greeted the rhino at Jakarta's main Soekarno-Hatta airport as light rain fell.
However, their view of Andalas was limited as he was brought out of the plane inside a closed wooden box with only gaps for air ventilation, and quickly put into a lorry for the last stages of the long journey to his new home on the island of Sumatra.
"The rhino seems to be healthy after the trip," said Marcellius Adi, an official with a wildlife research group.
He still faced land and sea travel to reach the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in the Way Kambas National Park.
"The reason this move is so significant is that it is the first relocation of this species back to Indonesia, the species' homeland," Robin Radcliffe of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in New York said before the trip began.
Only a few African rhinos have been moved from captivity back to the wild.
Andalas, born in the Cincinnati Zoo in September 2001, is the first Sumatran rhino not born in the wild in 112 years.
There are only about 300 Sumatran, or hairy, rhinos still surviving in the wild in southeast Asia. The Javan rhino is the rarest species.
"But the Sumatran rhino is considered more endangered, even though there are more of them because they are isolated and fragmented in habitats. Their population has been in a steady decline in the last 20 years," said Radcliffe, who works for the International Rhino Foundation.
"Sumatran rhinos are closely related to the woolly rhino which became extinct during the last Ice Age. It is a very prehistoric rhino," he said.
The hairy Sumatran rhino is the smallest of the rhino species but can still weigh from 1,300 to 1,800 pounds (600 to 800 kg), so transporting Andalas is not a simple task.
The lorry set off with Andalas to the western end of Java, from where a ferry was scheduled to take him on to Sumatra for an 8-10 hour drive to the sanctuary.