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| Location: |
Africa - Western Africa - Central African Republic |
| Subject: |
Distribution - Records |
| Species: |
White Rhino |
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Shortly before his death in 1979, M. Etienne Cannone (a French hunter who went out to Tchad at the age of eighteen and is credited with killing over a hundred black rhino on the Aouk River) informed M. Lefol that he had also shot about a dozen white rhino in this region, or the Doseo, Mya and Keita tributaries, probably about 1936/7 (Lefol pers comm. 1985).
About 1981 there was a report of a white rhino being seen near Golongosso in the north of the country, near the Aouk River, in an area which has been fairly intensively hunted in recent years and which is known to have contained black rhino (I saw rhino tracks there in 1976 but did not examine them closely). The report emanated from an American tourist-hunter and his Portuguese guide, both of whom had probably never seen a rhino before. Investigation showed the report to be unreliable, and there seems to be little doubt that they saw a black rhino. The tourist allegedly photographed it, but the photograph has never been produced.
The famous elephant hunter, Karamoja Bell, hunted this area along the Aouk about 1919 and reported rhino (among other species) as being numerous: `I will ... merely remark on the extraordinary numbers of rhino we met ... on several occasions our boys got into trouble with them and they had to be shot in order to avoid accidents' (Bell, 1960). Since Bell was capable of identifying white rhino, and in his book specifically refers to seeing them in the Lado Enclave, he probably would have made it clear that the rhino along the Aouk were white if this was the case. We know from Cannone that some did exist there, but they seem to have been relatively uncommon and are only reported from the Tchadian side. Unfortunately, the recent report from Golongosso has found its way into the literature (Anon, 1983; Western and Vigne, 1984; 1985); it is certainly nonsense to suggest that there may be a `reasonable' population in this area, as the first of these references postulates. The last black rhino to the north of the Aouk River (near to the Bahr Tao, Keita and Midjik Rivers in Tchad) were seen by hunters in 1978; and Lefol (pers.comm.) records seeing the last tracks of one on the Golongosso side in 1983 (near Caskay, 25 km south of Colongosso).
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The rhinos of the Central African Republic
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