This year, the game capture team brought in record revenue of R8,86-million for the Natal Parks Board at it's annual game auction. So no matter how emotional a thing it is to see a rhino stuck inside a boma waiting for relocation, plucked from its magnificent home range in the hills of Umfolozi, the practical conservation benefits are so enormous as to flatten any arguments to the contrary. Even if I did shed a tear watching that rhino crossing the purple Umfolozi in the twilight of another perfect day in Africa. The rhino capture operation is an astonishingly professional operation. Oryx hovers overhead and drops cargo sling net into gully.
Men move fast, rhino rolled into net, made comfortable.
Later I was leaning into the wind at a 40deg angle photographing when the chopper shifted position and I fell flat on my face, missing the ziziphus. Dust and pebbles and thorns and leaves and grass and branches fly about in a maelstrom which drives the dirt down the back of your neck, flaying eyeballs and skin. The men wear goggles and ear muffs for the noise, still, they cannot avoid the driven debris which gets into every crack and fanny. Flight Sergeant Harry Rice is the choreographer of the ballet that takes place once a rhino is down and the big Oryx helicopter, which can heft a load of around three tonnes, moves in to airlift out the comatose rhino. With the cargo sling hanging from the belly of the chopper, the pilot and co-pilot are blind, they cannot see what is going on below them.