The Black Rhinos of the Selous: A History Written, and Then Erased

No more rhinos in the Selous (Nyerere National Park)

When you walk the riverine forests of Nyerere National Park today — the great wild south of Tanzania that was, until 2019, the northern part of the Selous Game Reserve — you may spot lions slipping through the long grass, elephants drinking from the Rufiji, and packs of African wild dogs on the move at dawn. What you will almost certainly not see is a black rhinoceros. And yet, within living memory, this same landscape held one of the largest concentrations of black rhino anywhere on the African continent.

The story of how that vast population vanished, and the scientific evidence for what happened, is one every safari traveller crossing this ecosystem should know.

A species, a subspecies, a place

The black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) once ranged across most of sub-Saharan Africa. Conservation biologists today recognise three surviving subspecies: the south-western (D. b. bicornis), the south-eastern (D. b. minor), and the eastern (D. b. michaeli). It is this last — the Eastern Black Rhino — that inhabited the Selous ecosystem, alongside East Africa's other historic rhino strongholds in the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro highlands.

The Selous was, in many respects, an ideal habitat. The reserve covers more than 50,000 square kilometres of mixed miombo woodland, riverine forest and open grassland. It is bisected by the Rufiji River and its lake system, with a low human population in the surrounding catchments. For black rhinos — browsers that select carefully from a wide range of shrubs and small trees — the Selous offered space, food and water on a scale that has now become rare anywhere on Earth.

The high-water mark

The most widely cited figure for the Selous black rhino population at the end of the 1960s is approximately 10,000 individuals. By the time the Selous was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982, that figure had already fallen to around 3,000 — a steep drop, but still one of the largest single populations of the species on the continent. By the late 1980s, estimates had dropped to a few hundred. By the late 1990s, the population was no longer reliably found at all.

Globally, the picture was identical. Between 1970 and 1993, the African black rhino population is estimated to have fallen from around 65,000 to fewer than 2,500 — a decline of roughly 96 per cent in a single human generation.

The driver: poaching for horn

What collapsed the Selous population was not habitat loss, disease, or natural predation. The cause is well documented in the peer-reviewed conservation literature: commercial poaching for rhinoceros horn, driven by demand from East Asia, where horn was prized in traditional medicine, and from the Middle East, where it was used for the handles of ceremonial daggers in Yemen.

Several factors made the Selous especially vulnerable. The reserve's vast size — larger than Switzerland — meant patrol coverage was thin and difficult. Roads from the Tanzania coast offered easy ingress and egress. Civil unrest in neighbouring Mozambique through the 1980s created additional cross-border movement of armed groups. And the price of horn on the international black market remained high enough, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, to justify the considerable risk.

By the early 1990s the science was unambiguous. Aerial surveys, ground patrols and dung counts confirmed what rangers had long suspected: the great population had effectively ceased to function as a breeding unit. Whatever individuals remained were scattered, isolated and unable to reliably encounter one another to reproduce.

The scientific verdict

A 2017 paper published in Scientific Reports (Moodley et al., "Extinctions, genetic erosion and conservation options for the black rhinoceros") observed plainly that almost nothing is known about the existence of the small population inhabiting the Selous, and that — given recent records of elephant poaching across Tanzania — it is unlikely that this population still persists. The paper accordingly listed the Selous black rhino as globally extinct.

Subsequent assessments by the IUCN African Rhino Specialist Group, by TAWIRI (the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute), and by the Frankfurt Zoological Society — which has run aerial surveys in the ecosystem since 2012 — have not contradicted this conclusion. As of the most recent published censuses, no confirmed wild breeding population of black rhinos exists in the former Selous Game Reserve.

In other words: the Selous black rhinos are not merely endangered. They are, functionally, gone.

What remains, and what is being done

Tanzania has not given up on the black rhino. In the north of the country, Mkomazi National Park houses a fenced rhino sanctuary established in the 1990s, with founder animals translocated from European zoos. In the greater Serengeti ecosystem, the Grumeti Fund and Singita Grumeti translocated nine Eastern Black Rhinos from South Africa in September 2019, repopulating the western corridor. The first calf of the new generation was born in 2020.

These efforts together have begun to lift Tanzania's national black rhino population from its 1990s nadir, but they are concentrated in fenced or heavily protected sites — not in the vast openness of the southern Selous/Nyerere ecosystem. For Nyerere National Park specifically, there is no current confirmed wild breeding population of black rhinos. The Tanzanian government has expressed an intention to develop monitoring infrastructure for any individuals that may still range the area, but a return to the densities of the 1960s and 70s is not realistic on any near-term horizon.

Why the story matters to travellers

When guests visit Porini Camp today, they walk and drive and drift by boat through one of the largest intact wilderness areas left on Earth. The wildlife is extraordinary — the Selous/Nyerere ecosystem still supports significant lion populations, one of the most important African elephant populations on the continent, the largest concentration of African wild dogs anywhere, and more than 440 species of birds.

But the absence of one species, the black rhinoceros, is a reminder that wilderness is not a fixed inheritance. It is a working trust. The animals that walked the Beho Beho ridges and drank from the lakes a single human lifetime ago are no longer here because of a chain of human decisions — about markets, about enforcement, about borders, about the political will to protect remote places from organised criminal networks.

To know this story is, in our view, part of what it means to experience this landscape honestly. The Selous gave us, for a brief window, one of the most consequential populations of black rhino in the history of African conservation. The fact that we can no longer see them does not diminish the privilege of standing in the ecosystem they once dominated. If anything, it deepens it.

Sources

Moodley, Y. et al. (2017). "Extinctions, genetic erosion and conservation options for the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis)." Scientific Reports 7, 41417. nature.com/articles/srep41417

IUCN World Heritage Outlook — Selous Game Reserve, 2020 conservation outlook assessment.

IUCN African Rhino Specialist Group, periodic continental status reports.

TAWIRI — Selous–Mikumi Wildlife Census reports (2014, 2018, current).

Frankfurt Zoological Society — Nyerere National Park and Selous Game Reserve programme reports.

Pachyderm Journal — "Black rhino conservation in Tanzania: translocation efforts and further challenges."

International Rhino Foundation and Save the Rhino International, public population datasets.