One of the most precious things one can probably see in nature is a mother and her baby. Even more precious if it is an endangered animal like the White Rhino. The sad part of spotting and photographing rhino is that people get all up in arms when you publish your photos to show off these magnificent animals. I took the photos in this post somewhere in 2018 and as much as I would like to use them to promote the reserve I have decided to keep the location anonymous. It was fantastic though to sit and watch mom and baby out in the open just after they had a bit of a mud bath
The white rhinoceros or square-lipped rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is the largest extant species of rhinoceros with about 18 000 animals left in the world. A popular theory of the origins of the name “white rhinoceros” is a mistranslation from Dutch to English. The English word “white” is said to have been derived by mistranslation of the Dutch word “wijd”, which means “wide” in English. The word “wide” refers to the width of the rhinoceros’s mouth. So early English-speaking settlers in South Africa misinterpreted the “wijd” for “white” and the rhino with the wide mouth ended up being called the white rhino and the other one, with the narrow pointed mouth, was called the black rhinoceros.
The white rhino has a gestation period of 16 months before a single calf is born. The calf usually weighs between 40 and 65 kg. When threatened, the baby will run in front of the mother, which is very protective of her calf and will fight for it vigorously.
Information courtesy of Wikipedia
