Rare rhino filmed in Malaysia for the first time

One of the world's rarest rhinos has been caught on film for the first time on Borneo island, wildlife officials said yesterday as they showed footage of the animal eating, walking about and sniffing the camera.

Malaysian officials of global conservation organisation WWF said the two-minute video, recorded early this year by a camera hidden in the jungle, was the first to capture the behaviour of the elusive two-horned Borneo rhino in the wild.

There are only between 25 and 50 of the rhinos left alive in the dense jungles deep in the heart of the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo, and the animals are so secretive that the first still picture of one was only taken last year, the WWF said.

"At the moment they're so rare, it's difficult even to get the video," said Mike Chong, team leader of the WWF's rhino conservation project in peninsular Malaysia. "Once we have more videos, we can study them in greater detail."

The video clip shows the huge animal foraging in undergrowth, breathing heavily as it approaches the camera close enough for viewers to glimpse its eyes and long front horn, along with the individual hairs on its chin and the wrinkles on its neck. Except for the sighting in Sabah, there have been no confirmed reports of rhinos on Borneo for almost 20 years, leading experts to fear the species may now be extinct on the rest of the island, the WWF said.

Major threats the animals face include poaching, illegal encroachment into key home areas, and the fact that they are so cut off from each other that they may rarely meet to breed.

Rhino horns, made of hair-like keratin fibres, have reputed aphrodisiac qualities and are a prized ingredient of traditional Asian medicines.

Many females also have difficulty reproducing, and with many ageing animals in the population, the numbers of those dying could be exceeding new births, the WWF said. The photos and video footage will be used to determine the condition of the rhinos in the wild, Raymond Alfred, project manager for WWF's Asian rhino and elephant programmes, said.

"But we have to realise that these rhinos could face extinction in the next ten years if their habitat continues to be disturbed and enforcement is not in place," he added.