27/08/2026
STOEP CHAT
by Melanie Gosling
27th August 2026
Black Rhino Teenagers Hang Out Together
Any of you who have been on trail in game reserves will know how scary it is when your ranger takes you into thick bush because that is where you find black rhino.
Unlike their placid white rhino cousins, black rhino are quite fierce and charge anything that comes into their territory.
Interesting new black rhino research dropped into my inbox today from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). WWF has been running a programme for 23 years to increase numbers of these seriously endangered animals by transporting some to new areas to start new breeding populations.
A fantastic programme.
They have moved 270 black rhino and created 17 new populations on a total of 360,000ha of land. You’ve probably seen photographs of rhino being transported by helicopter, blindfolded and dangling beneath the chopper by their legs. What a sight!
Anyway, because each of these new black rhino populations has been closely monitored, many with tracking devices, there is now a stack of data about them that some scientists have dug into to see what they can find.
An interesting thing they discovered was that black rhino are not always as solitary as was thought, but go through phases of being social in small groups. And guess what? Many black rhino “teenagers” like to hang out together in a group - just like humans.
But not all of them. Researchers have found that those teenaged rhino that do hang out together grow into less aggressive adults. So if managers are deciding which rhino to capture to move to a new area, they suggest taking those that were “social teenagers” because these rhino are less likely to engage in territorial fights – which can end up with one killing the other.
I remember a ranger, Dave Reynolds, who was almost killed by a black rhino while leading a walking trail at Lake St Lucia in KZN back in the late 1980s I think. He told me that when he saw the rhino charging he instinctively raised his rifle.
“But I knew how threatened these rhino were and I couldn’t shoot it,” he said.
I don’t recall if he got off a warning shot, but either way the animal smacked into him and gored him in the groin. He was badly injured but survived to tell the tale.
The story has an interesting twist. Dave and his wife had been married for some years but didn’t have children. Some time after he had been gored, Dave’s wife became pregnant.
Well, for many locals that just confirmed what they believed: that rhino horn increases a man’s virility.
All nonsense of course, but Dave was called Ubhejane after that, meaning black rhino in Zulu.
I remember his amusement when he moved up north to work at a Lowveld game reserve.
“When I got here from Zululand, the guys already knew me as Ubhejane. The story had travelled all this way,” he chuckled.
I’ve always admired Dave’s enormous courage and commitment to conservation.
Not many could face down a charging black rhino and think about the animal’s survival rather than his own.
