The last Northern White Rhinos

This afternoon we made a visit to the last 3 Northern White Rhinos in existence. There were 4 of them during my previous trip, but one of the male rhinos died a couple of years ago by natural cause. 
Ol Pejeta conservancy is housing the last male and 2 females in their endangered species enclosure. This is 17 acres of land within the conservancy where they keep all predators outside and try to let the population of a specific species grow in a natural way. If there are enough they let them out of the enclosure again. 
We had the pleasure of feeding Sudan, their 43 year old male, who still gets some additional food like carrots as he has grown used to that during his life in a zoo in the Czech Republic before arriving at Ol Pejeta.

He still is fertile but has really bad back legs which stop him from mounting a female. The 2 females that they have are mother and daughter. Mother has bad back legs as well, both of them very likely due to sometimes wintery conditions in the zoo in the Czech Republic. So mum cannot give birth because of that. Daughter is missing a uterus, so also cannot give birth. That is why Ol Pejeta has started an IVF program with some leading scientists and use a Southern White Rhino female to carry the embryo up until birth. IVF has never been done with a rhino so a lot of time is spend on figuring out what to do and how to do it. They think they can do the first attempt this year, the picture below shows both female Northern White Rhinos and the female Southern White Rhino who will get the embryo. 

On a trivial pursuit note, did you know that the White Rhino was first discovered by a Dutch person. He described a wide mouth (‘wijd’ in Dutch). Phonetically it is pronounced similarly as white, hence the name. 
Tomorrow will be again be a full working day, during which we will also be discussing how we can use technology within conservation. I might share some ideas in my blog post tomorrow.