The last of their kind: rhinos on the Laikipia Plateau in Kenya

Suddenly there it is, perhaps the most precious animal in the world. As if carved from rock, it rises from the dry savannah grass, a creature with horns like those of a triceratops. When the rhinoceros spots Zacharia Mutai, the giant trots towards the keeper almost happily. The horn, almost as long as his arm, is aimed directly at the little man. But he is not afraid.

"Najin was born and raised in a zoo," says the Kenyan, "she has known me for a long time." He has brought carrots for the animals. They particularly like them. While the other two rhinos pick up the presents from the ground in their spacious enclosure, Najin eats them from Mutai's hand. The keeper strokes her cheek, which is lined with deep wrinkles. "I have known her since she arrived in Kenya," says the 45-year-old, "I can read her thoughts."

Najin was born in July 1989 in the Czech Dvůr Králové Safari Park. The fact that the Berlin Wall fell a few weeks after her birth and turned her homeland upside down would eventually turn the little pachyderm's life upside down. 20 years later, in a world that was opening up, big plans were made for the animal. Because Najin is not just any rhino. In 2009, she was flown to the Ol Pejeta Reserve in central Kenya with her daughter Fatu, her father Sudan, and Suni, another bull. At the time, the four Czechs were among the last eight northern white rhinos in the world. It was hoped that the animals could be saved from imminent extinction by relocating them to the protected area on the Laikipia Plateau near their original range.

The subspecies was once widespread from Chad and Sudan to Uganda and the Congo. During the time of the pharaohs, they were also found in the Nile Valley and in what is now Morocco. However, poachers brought them to the brink of extinction within a few decades in the 20th century. Suni died in 2014, and the following year his last two conspecifics in the zoos of Dvůr Králové and San Diego also died.

After Najin has eaten the last carrot, she grazes leisurely next to Fatu and another rhino. "Tauwa is their friend and trainer," says Mutai about the southern white rhino. "She is supposed to teach them natural behavior that they don't know from the zoo." Najin and Fatu are hardly different from their enclosure mate, but Mutai draws her visitors' attention to the fact that the northern white rhinos have noticeably hairier ears.

Three times a day, tourists come to the enclosure in safari vehicles to photograph the last two of their species. To do so, they pay the equivalent of around 65 euros in addition to the entrance fee to Ol Pejeta. Weaver birds are busily searching for nesting material around the three rhinos. The cheerful twittering of the tricoloured glossy starlings fills the cloudy afternoon. "On clear days, you can see snow-capped Mount Kenya from here," says Mutai. In the shadow of the five-thousand-metre peak, the time of the last two northern white rhinos seems to be passing in an idyllic way. In the protected area, they are guarded around the clock by rangers and examined by veterinarians.

"Najin inherited her friendly and relaxed nature from her father Sudan," says Mutai. You can feel his deep connection with the animals; he is as proud of the rhino as an Olympic show jumper is of his horse. "When Sudan died on March 19, 2018, I was with him until the last moment," he says with a smile. "His death shocked the whole world." Long before Sudan, the last male animal, died, scientists knew that the subspecies would probably disappear forever if decisive action was not taken. They do not want to simply accept the inevitable extinction.

In autumn 2023, a research group led by Biorescue, an international consortium of scientists and conservationists, succeeded for the first time in transplanting a laboratory-created rhinoceros embryo of the southern subspecies into the uterus of a female. The pregnancy proceeded as hoped for over 70 days. However, extreme rainfall led to a chain of unforeseen incidents that led to the death of the surrogate mother, a southern white rhinoceros cow. Her enclosure had been flooded. This allowed clostridia spores to reach the surface from deeper layers of the earth, poisoning the pregnant animal.

"The transfer and the pregnancy were still a success for us," says Thomas Hildebrandt, Biorescue project leader, head of the department for reproduction management at the Berlin Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and professor at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the Free University. Biorescue and the leading Leibniz Institute viewed the surrogate mother's pregnancy with a fetus that was 6.4 centimeters long at the time of her death as a scientific breakthrough. "He had already survived all of his critical moments," says Hildebrandt. What has already been achieved has now paved the way for the same technology to be used on northern white rhinos. Since 2019, 36 northern white rhino embryos have been created and cryopreserved using the frozen sperm of animals that have already died. They are stored in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius in Berlin and Cremona.

But as long as an advanced pregnancy is not confirmed, Biorescue is keeping quiet. "In humans, the success rate is only between 20 and 50 percent, despite around four million per year," says Hildebrandt, "with a new species, embryo transfer is of course always a big challenge." If the newly chosen surrogate mother is ready to mate in Ol Pejeta, things have to happen quickly. "That's a huge amount of documentation that has to be resolved within four days," says Hildebrandt, "but now we have the concession of Lufthansa that the pilots can take the embryos with them in the cockpit."

The reproductive biologist is optimistic about the future: for him, it is only a matter of time before a birth is successful. "I am 100 percent sure of that. We hope that we will be able to report the first successful pregnancy in 2025. The big goal is, of course, to release the animal back into the wild in Central Africa. But at the moment we are still a little way away from that."

Kenya is now the country with the largest rhino population in East Africa. More than 1000 of the endangered black rhinos live here, as well as the last two northern rhinos and almost 1000 southern white rhinos, most of them in Laikipia. Ol Pejeta is just one of several protected areas on the plateau that rises to over 2000 meters. In the central Kenyan highlands, tourists have a particularly good chance of seeing both species on a safari. Unlike in South Africa, where the world's largest rhino population lives today and where a real war is still raging between rangers and poachers over the nose horn that is so coveted in East Asia, there have only been isolated cases of poaching in Kenya in recent years. As a result, Kenyan rhinos do not usually have their horns removed as a protective measure, as is the case in many South African reserves.

In the Borana conservation area in the far east of the Laikipia Plateau, Rianto Lokoran carefully observes a slope covered in bushes through his binoculars. The head of the anti-poaching unit in the 130 square kilometre reserve sometimes leads small groups of tourists on hikes to see his most important charges. For many holidaymakers in Kenya, meeting one of the black rhinos, which are generally considered to be aggressive, at eye level, not in an off-road vehicle, but on foot, is one of the highlights of a safari.

"We are not interested in the thrill, but in conveying a greater understanding of the animals' way of life," says Lokoran. The ranger has a rifle dangling over his shoulder - just in case. But he has never used it, he assures us. If you treat the rhinos responsibly, it is not necessary. The 42-year-old lets fine savannah sand trickle through his fingers. "This tells us the direction of the wind, to make sure that the animals do not smell us too early," he explains. On the other side of the hill he has spotted a mother rhino with her calf.

"The first 15 rhinos were resettled here in the Lewa Conservation Area next door in 1983," says Lokoran. By the mid-1980s, the number of black rhinos in Kenya had fallen from more than 20,000 to just 350. Conservationists feared that the species could disappear forever. "We now have one of the best places in Africa to observe the animals." The fences between Lewa and Borana have now been removed to create more freedom of movement for the population, which has grown to a total of 268 animals. Together they now form the largest rhino reserve in East Africa.

However, the Lewa Borana Conservation Area only makes up a small part of the Laikipia Plateau. There are more than a dozen other reserves spread across the entire area of ​​the plateau, each under its own management. Most of them are fenced in. There are corridors for wild animals within Kenya's second largest contiguous ecosystem that still connect the Samburu National Reserve in the north with Mount Kenya National Park and are used by elephants, among others. Some of them are still used today by the Samburu, a people closely related to the Maasai, whose herds of cattle have shared the grazing land with the wild animals for centuries. However, barriers and new fences are still being erected to protect the rhinos.

"Our rhinos need more space," says Llewellyn Dyer, looking out over a deep valley from one of Borana's mountain ranges. "More animals are now dying in fights with other rhinos than from poaching." Studies also show that the birth rate decreases when too many rhinos share a limited habitat. At the beginning of the 20th century, Dyer's great-grandparents, who come from Great Britain, were allocated farmland in the part of British East Africa that now forms the Borana Conservation Area. Her great-grandson is now supporting the transformation of the former pastures into a lucrative safari destination with several luxurious lodges such as the Lengishu House, from which you can enjoy a breathtaking view of the Laikipia wilderness. The rhinos in particular are now the driving force behind exclusive tourism, which has created important jobs in the structurally weak region.

Dyer dreams that the rhinos will one day be able to spread freely from here to the west of Laikipia and attract a growing number of tourists. However, he views the project to preserve the northern white rhinos in Ol Pejeta with suspicion. "In my opinion, this is a spectacular waste of money," says the Kenyan. Instead, they should focus on finding solutions for the growing number of other rhinos.

It remains uncertain whether rhinos will ever reclaim their old habitat from Laikipia, which they lost decades ago in East and Central Africa. Whether the animals will then have hairy ears or not may be of secondary importance to many of Laikipia's residents. However, for the scientists who continue to fight for the survival of the northern white rhinos, Kenya could soon make history in nature conservation. And in the midst of a dramatic extinction of species, it may also bring a glimmer of hope to the world for other endangered animals.