CHRISTMAS WITH CHEWORE

ilarivers Editorial April 1, 2022

CHRISTMAS WITH CHEWORE
I J Larivers

There’s always a grain of truth in superstitions. For instance, if you see a chameleon walking across your path, that’s OK, but if it’s walking down the path, toward or away from you, it is a harbinger of disaster. So says Ndebele legend. If you think about it chameleons are weighted far more on the prey side than the predator side, and despite their artistry of camouflage, that only works if they’ve got some obliging background in front of which to do their stuff. So, they’d best make haste from point A to point B. Because you are not likely to see a chameleon walking down the path. If you do, and you actually register it, you’ll probably bewondering enough about it that you’ll step on the puff adder around the corner. See? Chameleons walking down the path are bad luck.

This and other legends I learned over Christmas of 1994, whilst spending a relaxing ten days at Tashinga National Parks rest camp on the shores of Lake Kariba with a colleague.

To make ourselves useful we offered to bring up a Unimog truck for the station, and a cattle crush which had been modified to incorporate a scale for use with Chewore, the baby rhinoceros.

Although Tashinga was one of National Parks’ Intensive Protection Zones for rhinos, the local villagers surrounding the National Park are not adverse to setting as many snares as they can steal the wire to make for bushmeat more than anything else. Little Chewore’s mother was caught in one such deathtrap, and although after her discovery and capture she survived, for a long period she was unable to produce milk for her offspring. Thus it came to be that the little brute was incarcerated in a large pen on station where she quickly made friends with, and provided hours of enjoyment for, anyone who overcame the myriad obstacles of getting to Tashinga to see her. This was a perfect opportunity for the station ecologist, Paul Wood, to accumulate a lot of raw data on a healthy growing baby rhinoceros.

Having arranged for the ‘Mog and the cattle crush to be relayed across the lake by ferry, we made our own way over in a 17-foot powerboat, and were met by the Senior Ranger, Gary Douglas. We settled into a couple of days of lying in what little sun there was, catching more than our fair share of fish, getting in a little pistol practice on the station firing range, and feeding and playing with Chewore.

Chewore’s pen was made of sturdy mopane logs, and was more than large enough to accommodate her antics. She loved being scratched behind the ears, and reciprocated with the high-pitched whistling squeaks that baby rhinos are famous for. She consumed gallons and gallons of formula throughout the day from whoever wanted to feed her, and there was a long queue for that job. She had been given a couple of old car tyres as toys – pet shops don’t usually stock stuff for baby rhinoceroses – and she would spend what little time she wasn’t eating sleeping or squeaking, chasing them around her enclosure to the delight of anyone who cared to go in and roll them for her. Just as well, too, for a baby rhinoceros is a stocky, sturdy, powerful scale model of an adult rhinoceros. Chewore loved to play, but the problem arose when you wanted to leave. She still wanted to play. She weighed more than I did, and the only way of getting out of her pen was to send a tyre off in any direction that would allow you to slip out the gate.

Gary had friends out for Christmas, and my colleague Paul Oleszczuk did impala fillets to an old Polish recipe. That Christmas was made up of many things: good company, the African bush, and Chewore.

Then came the buffalo.

Gary had received reports of a wounded buffalo along the foreshore to the west of the camp. Wounded buffalo make ordinary buffalo look like stuffed cuddly toys. Night was fast falling, and one of nature’s imposing sound and light displays that had been in the background all day was looking to erupt into the mother of all thunderstorms.

After some years of drought, the lake foreshore was void of anything that might credibly be called vegetation, and didn’t look too inviting just then if you happened to be the height of a person – which we coincidentally were - and the tallest thing for several hundred metres around. I was carrying my FN-FAL rifle seemingly just for the sake of conductivity.

But go out in search of the beast we did. Gary had a short wheelbase pre-production Land Rover, and, as we drove onto the foreshore I saw one of the most impressive lightning displays I have ever seen in my life – partly as it was all around us in an arc of 360o. The thunder was still a muffled rumbling ominous growl in the distance.

We drove a kilometre or so east of the camp, in which direction we knew the buffalo herd to have gone. The lions would be following the herd, and any wounded animal would soon be dealt with naturally. No buff, wounded or otherwise, anywhere to be seen. We were questioning the veracity of the report, but decided to take a quick look to the west – the animal would have to be seriously incapacitated to be this far behind the herd.

Sure enough, just as we were having thoughts of home and warm, dry, beds, two eyes shone in the beam of the spotlight maybe fifty metres away. It was a large cow, and her left front leg was hanging from the limb by a thin strand of skin – she had clearly been attacked by a crocodile whilst wading in shallow water. She couldn’t move fast, but surprisingly she could move, and didn’t regard us at all like long-lost relatives. Gary had the heavy rifle, a .458 Winchester, and climbed from the Land Rover and put in a good heart and lung shot into the buffalo’s left side. She went down in a couple of minutes. That was about the time the heavens opened, and, soaked to the skin, we got back after midnight, with fresh buffalo liver for the next morning’s breakfast. The rangers recovered the remainder of the carcass the next morning.

Chewore of course had been unaware of any of this, and was sitting out the deluge in a sheltered section of her boma.

She had been rescued from a place known as Tunsa Springs in the Chewore area of the lower Zambezi in the mid 1990s after her mother had been snared. Chewore had been CASEVAC’d out by helicopter, and Mom followed in a truck. Tashinga would offer them both the protection they needed to survive. Eventually, one of the guests at former National Parks warden Steve Edwards’s Musango Safari Camp fell so much under the baby rhino’s spell that she gave up her day job in Switzerland to take care of Chewore full time.
By definition, habituated animals have lost their fear of man. This can be a problem with something as big as a rhinoceros, and it is even more of a concern when the animal is rare, endangered, and targeted by poaching gangs. As expected Chewore became a regular fixture at Maronga tented camp, which offered her a degree of protection, and she would often sleep in the kitchen tent and socialize with guests.

When she had grown to near adulthood, it was thought best to relocate Chewore to Hwange National Park, and she was duly sent to Sinamatella. As her contact with humans had always been in a positive light, she was oblivious to the dangers of being a rhinoceros in Africa, and by way of exploring her new surroundings crossed the border into Botswana. Fortunately the poaching problem at the time was less acute there, and she again had the good fortune to find herself in the company of guides and rangers who looked after her and even exploited her habit of wanting to find out what was in the cooler boxes at sundowner time! And they say rhinoceroses don’t have a sense of humour.

So far, though Chewore is probably only somewhere around middle aged, the story has had a happy ending. She is now one of a handful of black rhinos who live at the Khama Rhino Sanctuary.

Located some 25 kilometres northwest of Serowe in Botswana, the Khama Rhino Sanctuary is a community-based wildlife project which was established in 1992 to reclaim a tract of wild bush, and involve the local communities in conservation – especially of the endangered rhinoceros. Incorporating almost 8,600 hectares of Kalahari sandveld, the sanctuary is home to both black and white rhino, some thrity other species of wildlife and 230 species of birds. The prime focus of the Khama Rhino Sanctuary is the rhinoceros breeding programme, and so far Chewore has done her part by giving birth to two calves. To date, sixteen rhinos from Khama have been relocated to other protected areas, and the sanctuary itself is heavily protected by not only its own corps of rangers but also soldiers from the Botswana Defence Force.
By all accounts, Chewore is now far less inclined to approach humans, and seems to have found her true niche in nature at last.

She was the first rhinoceros to be hand-reared by National Parks at Tashinga, and being a pioneer of sorts there were a number of lessons to be learned about the re-integration of habituated rhinos back into the wild from her example.

According to current conventional wisdom, the release process should be gradual, and into a location far enough away from where the calf was raised that it will not try and return to be with humans. One of the things that seemed to attract Chewore after she was released was all the people-food goodies that she had been given as she was growing up and which she knew would be forthcoming from the ubiquitous cooler boxes around camp. While it is tempting to give baby animals treats, this is very rarely doing them and favours.

With it looking like much of the rhino’s hope for future survival is going to revolve around captive breeding, little Chewore was a pathfinder in many ways.

PHOTOS:

1. The author with Chewore.
2. Transporting the modified cattle crush.
3. Chewore's mother recovering from her injuries.
4. National Parks Warden Paul Oleszczuk putting in some range time.
5. Chewore making sure the table settings were correct.
6. In later years - photo Barry and Lynda Revell.