After an overnight in Johannesburg, we again boarded a small plane and flew to Uppington, a small town at the bottom of the Kalahari desert!!….

The property that we were visiting was gorgeous….

…and even more so at nighttime….

Our room had amazing views…..

….especially early in the morning…..

The landscaping was done with succulents…..

….and the interior decorations were amazing…..

I spent a lot of time looking at this light fixture!!

But we are not here for the ambiance….we are here for RHINOS!!!

Let’s have a Rhino tutorial!!!

There are two types of Rhinos…..Black and White. Now, I thought that the White rhinos were actually a different color but I was WRONG…..VERY wrong!!!

The primary difference between these two species is the size and shape of their mouths!!. Black Rhinos have a pointed mouth while the White Rhino has a flat mouth…..

Black on the left and White on the right.

The reason that they are called WHITE rhinos is that the natives were actually saying “wide” but it was mistranslated as white!!

Are you enjoying the biology lesson???

So, here’s the thing about rhinos…

They are endangered! Primarily because of their importance in Asian medicine.

The owner of this property has a passion for protecting these animals and the property has a nice herd of both types of rhinos The idea is that they will share these rhinos with other Parks and individuals who want to save them.

Part of this process is doing genetic testing on the rhinos before they are moved to another area. The reason for this is that they want to send pairs of animals that are not genetically related.

So, we are here for the tagging and genetic testing of four rhino cows

It was a supremely interesting process, and I videoed one of the events so that you could see it in real-time.

Here we go…

If you are viewing this blog post on your email, you will need to click into the actual blog post to see it. For some reason, it won’t embed directly.

I hope that you enjoyed that!!

One funny exchange…. at one point, we were quite a distance from where they were about to dart the next rhino and Jacques needed to drive FAST to get there. I was in the back of the truck and he asked Michael if I would want to get into the truck. Michael said that he could ask me but probably I would prefer to stay outside. He was right!!

I hung on for dear life and yelled Yee-Haw a few times but loved every second of the VERY fast journey!!