IWN Digest — Friday, 12 June 2026
Thirty-five calves. That’s the number a decade of tracking has produced from a rhino population that did not exist in Assam‘s Manas National Park twenty-five years ago — because poachers had wiped it out entirely.
Manas, in Assam’s Chirang and Baksa districts, once held more than 100 greater one-horned rhinos. Civil unrest and sustained poaching through the 1990s ended that population completely. What has happened since, according to Mongabay, is one of India’s quieter conservation turnarounds.
Two routes back
Under Indian Rhino Vision 2020, 22 rhinos were translocated into Manas from Kaziranga National Park and Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary between 2008 and 2021. Separately, 20 orphaned or injured rhinos were rehabilitated and released into the park between 2006 and 2021.
A new study tracking both groups — plus the first generation born in Manas itself — found 35 births between 2012 and 2021. Nineteen calves came from translocated females, nine from rehabilitated ones, and five from the first Manas-born generation, now breeding on their own.
Different rhinos, different habits
The study, led by wildlife biologist Deba Kumar Dutta of the IUCN SSC Asian Rhino Specialist Group, found translocated rhinos ranged across roughly 339 square kilometres of the park — wild-caught animals reverting to wild habits. Rehabilitated rhinos, raised in captivity, stuck to about 52 square kilometres near the park’s core, sometimes wandering close to villages at night before returning by morning.
The Manas-born generation split the difference, with home ranges averaging 79 square kilometres. Some females were seen calving in the same spots their mothers had used.
Most births — 14 of the 35 — happened during the monsoon, when food and water are at their most abundant.
Not finished yet
Dutta and his co-authors are clear that the population hasn’t reached its full breeding potential. Early poaching killed several adult males, skewing the sex ratio for years. Births dropped to zero in 2016 before recovering.
Yadvendradev Jhala, retired dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, put it bluntly: rhinos breed slowly, and a small population can unravel as easily as it was rebuilt. He argues Manas’s rhinos need to be managed as part of a wider metapopulation with Kaziranga, Pobitora and rhino populations in West Bengal — allowing animals to move between sites and keep the gene pool healthy.
Dutta’s own recommendations are practical: more rhinos from donor populations if needed, invasive plants cleared from the grasslands, and Manas’s water sources kept flowing through the dry season. The rhinos came back once. Whether they stay depends on what happens in the grass between now and the next monsoon.
Sources: Mongabay India · Mongabay (short article)
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