For the first time in more than four decades, southern white rhinos are grazing wild grassland in northern Uganda. The Uganda Wildlife Authority has released four of the animals into Kidepo Valley National Park, moved from the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary that was built to bring the species back.
It is a careful, deliberate return. Forty-three years after poaching wiped out the country's last free-ranging rhinos, four more are due to follow by May, for a founding group of eight in the park.
From an empty landscape
Uganda once held around 300 northern white rhinos and 400 eastern black rhinos. Both were devastated by intense poaching during the civil unrest that began in the late 1970s, and the last wild rhino in the country was killed in 1983. For a generation, the sound of a rhino moving through the bush was simply gone.
The animals arriving in Kidepo are southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum simum), a different subspecies from the northern white rhinos that were hunted out here. "We are glad and privileged to be taking back rhinos," UWA executive director James Musinguzi said at Ziwa, acknowledging that the returning animals are not the exact subspecies Uganda lost.
A sanctuary that did its job
The story starts at Ziwa. A breeding program was set up there in 2005, and six southern white rhinos, four from Kenya and two from a sanctuary in the United States, arrived the following year. Under round-the-clock protection, that small founder group grew to 42 by 2023, enough to begin returning animals to the wild.
The reintroduction follows Uganda's National Rhino Conservation Strategy and a feasibility assessment by the wildlife authority. In January, four rhinos from Ziwa were moved to Ajai Wildlife Reserve in the West Nile region; Kidepo is the next stronghold.
Not without risk
Robert Aruho, the veterinarian who led UWA's rhino program from 2013 to 2020, says the grazers will help keep Kidepo's grasslands in check and draw visitors that raise the value of the park. He is also clear about the challenges ahead: managing the animals' health, the risk of conflict with neighbouring communities, and the high cost of guarding rhinos against poachers.
Spreading the animals across more than one site, he says, means not keeping all the eggs in one basket. For now, four rhinos are back on Ugandan grassland, with four more on the way, and a landscape that had forgotten them is learning their shape again.
Source: Mongabay. Read the original: https://news.mongabay.com/2026/03/decades-after-poaching-drove-them-extinct-rhinos-are-back-in-the-wild-in-uganda/
