With their hulking stature, leathery hides, and formidable horns, rhinos appear to be invincible. Daphne Sheldrick used to call rhinos ‘the last living dinosaurs.’ It’s a fitting epithet: Over the past 60 million years, they have braved ice ages, battled prehistoric predators, and biologically adapted for the modern world.

Not so long ago, Kenya was teeming with black rhinos. In fact, they were seen as ‘vermin,’ notorious for crop raiding farms and clobbering unsuspecting passersby. No game drive in Tsavo was complete without experiencing a full-blown rhino charge as one barrelled out of the bush.

But that all changed when far reaches of the world got a taste for rhino horn, fueling a catastrophic wave of poaching that very nearly destroyed the species. Prized for its perceived medicinal properties and as a status symbol, rhino horn is actually mostly keratin, much like a human fingernail. Human greed, however, saw only dollar signs.

Before the 1970s, some 20,000 black rhinos roamed freely across Kenya. By the mid-1980s, populations had plummeted to less than 400. In a matter of a decade, the once-ubiquitous symbols of Kenya’s wilderness had been nearly poached to extinction.

Today, black rhinos are the face of a tentative comeback story here in Kenya. Despite the heavy losses rhinos suffered at the hands of poachers, our populations have climbed back. We now hold the third-largest rhino population in Africa, with approximately 2,102 individuals: at last count, 1,059 black rhinos, 1,041 southern white rhinos, and the world’s two remaining northern white rhinos.

Rhinos are inextricably linked with our past, present, and future. During their early Tsavo days, Daphne and David Sheldrick were among the first people in Kenya to successfully raise orphaned rhinos. Over the years, we have successfully raised 19 orphaned black rhinos.

When the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust was established in 1977, it was to address the most pressing conservation issues at the time. Our first decade focused largely on rhino conservation — as Daphne said, “something needed to be done rapidly.” We were keenly aware that, without immediate action, Kenya ran the very real risk of losing all its rhinos.

The Trust helped fund Tsavo West National Park’s first dedicated stronghold for rhinos, Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary. In the 1970s, orphaned rhinos Stroppy and Hoshim (raised by Daphne and David in Tsavo) were translocated to Solio Ranch, where they became the founding population of the renowned Solio Rhino Sanctuary. We also supported the foundation of Lake Nakuru Rhino Sanctuary and later Meru Rhino Sanctuary.

Like the other rhino sanctuaries, Meru has been an extraordinary success, emerging as yet another important stronghold for the species. Working in partnership with the Kenya Wildlife Service, we provide ongoing support, including the funding of a fencing expansion that more than doubled the size of the sanctuary, installed essential infrastructure, and implemented multiple security upgrades to ensure the safety of its threatened residents.

We also devote significant time and resources to rhino conservation within the Tsavo Conservation Area. Our Aerial Unit conducts regular rhino monitoring and surveillance patrols in the Tsavo Conservation Area, including the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary, the Intensive Protection Zone in Tsavo West National Park, and the IPZ in Tsavo East National Park, all of which are home to significant populations of critically endangered black rhinos. In Q1-Q2 2025, SWT pilots have already dedicated 231.5 aerial hours to rhino surveillance.

Our rhino conservation support takes us across Kenya. We donated eight rhino crates to the KWS Animal Capture Unit, used to translocate rhinos out of conflict zones and into viable habitats. For the past two years, our pilots have taken part in a multi-day mission in the Mara to ear-notch and GPS sensor-tag black rhinos. This was done to enhance the protection of these endangered species, ensuring that each can be easily identified, located, and accounted for. In 2024, we supported the tagging of 13 black rhinos, followed by 14 in 2025.

And of course, working in partnership with the Kenya Wildlife Service, our SWT/KWS Mobile Veterinary Units are at the frontlines of rhino conservation. From emergency treatments to technical cases that support their protection, our teams are there to answer the call for any rhino in need. To date, they have attended to 472 rhino cases, supporting 1,144 individuals in the process.

Through our Orphans’ Project, we have successfully hand-raised 19 orphaned black rhinos to date. Each orphan rescued represents the possibility of future generations — and indeed, many of our ex-orphan rhinos have gone on to raise their own families in the wild. Solio, an black rhino we rescued in 2010, is now living wild in Nairobi National Park and a mother of two.

Meet the orphaned black rhinos currently in our care:

Chamboi, our social butterfly

Apollo, our stubborn shadow

Maxwell, our Nursery patriarch