Bringing Back the Southern White Rhino

The addition of four new titles to Crabtree’s “Animals Back from the Brink” series brings the total number of books in the series to 14. Like most Crabtree series, these books are structured around two-page chapters which contain brief blocks of text accompanied by numerous full-colour captioned photographs. Each book begins with an introduction to the animal species that is risk and why it is in this state. The content of books’ second chapter, “Species at Risk”, is essentially common to all, and, in it, the authors introduce the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which, since 1964, “publishes the Red List of Threatened Species each year, which tells people how likely a plant or animal species is to become extinct.” These pages also identify the criteria the scientists use in determining where to place some 80,000 species of plants and animals on the Red list’s nine point scale that ranges from “Not Evaluated (N E) Not yet evaluated against the criteria” to “Extinct (EX) No living individuals survive.” The chapters which follow identify the specific threats to the survival of the book’s animal as well as the people and/or organizations that identified the species’ survival problem and how they went about rectifying the situation in order to bring the animal back from the brink of extinction. Three of the four books include two maps, one showing the endangered animal’s historic range and the other where the animal can presently be found. Because the island foxes’ past and present ranges are the same, Bringing Back the Island Fox only has a single map.

As explained in Bringing Back the Southern White Rhino, historically the rhinos’ numbers were reduced by loss of habitat due to human settlement and the rampant killing of rhinos by sports hunters, but today poaching is the main threat to the survival of this animal, with the poachers principally seeking only the rhinos’ horns which are erroneously believed by some societies to have medicinal properties. In 2011, the species “was described as Near Threatened (NT). Today, they number about 20,000.” The success in increasing the numbers can be attributed to breeding programs, the establishment of wildlife parks and enhanced anti-poaching measures.

All four books end with the same six closing sections: “What Does the Future Hold?” (Called “Looking to the Future” in the blue iguana book), “Saving Other Species”, “What Can You Do to Help?”, “Learning More” (which lists four books and four-six briefly annotated websites), a “Glossary” of words bolded in the text, and a one-page “Index”.

Bringing Back the Southern White Rhino would be a worthwhile addition to school and public libraries’ endangered species collections.