Last year, raging monsoon floods submerged nearly 8o percent of Kaziranga National Park. Unable to access drier highlands in time, more than 450 animals — including 26 rhinos, 363 hog deer, 14 swamp deer and 21 wild pigs — drowned in the floodwaters unleashed by the River Brahmaputra, which marks the park’s northern boundary.

Many animals were also killed by speeding vehicles while trying to cross a national highway to escape the flood. This highway, NH 37, forms the southern boundary of the park, separating it from the wooded highlands of the Karbi Anglong hills.

Babies were particularly affected. The flood — Kaziranga’s worst since 1998 — created a pool of orphans stranded in the flood. Either their mothers had drowned, or they had been unable to keep pace with their mothers as they attempted to escape.

Eight rhino babies survived.

In January, I traveled to CWRC where these rhino calves now live. On the way to the center, I passed several wild rhinos, mostly mothers with calves, grazing in Kaziranga’s grasslands amid large herds of hog deer and countless troops of rhesus macaques.

Despite warning signs on the highway asking people to be mindful of their speed, my driver, a young man named Babul Hussain, sped down the road, swaying his head to loud Assamese songs blaring out of the car’s sound system. Next to Panbari Nature Reserve, one of the last homes of the endangered western Hoolock gibbons, Hussain turned right and drove through a tea plantation, stopping in front of a gate that marked the entrance to CWRC.

“I live in Panbari, but I had no idea this was right next door,” he said with a grin.

Spread over a 17-acre plot of land, the rehabilitation center was founded in 2002 as a joint-venture between the Assam Forest Department, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), and the Wildlife Trust of India.

Its main purpose at the time of its inception was to rescue and rehabilitate flood-displaced wild animals from Kaziranga, said Rathin Barman, deputy director of WTI and the head of the center. Lying in the floodplain of the massive River Brahmaputra, the park is regularly inundated during the monsoons, often giving its animals little opportunity to escape.

Now, CWRC caters to most wildlife emergencies around the park, including animals displaced due to human-wildlife conflict, or babies orphaned due to poaching of their mothers. The center’s specialization, though, is hand-raising orphaned large mammals like rhinos, elephants and wild buffalo.

Currently, CWRC is home to nine rhino calves, including eight rescued from flood waters in 2016, and an older calf rescued in 2015. The center also houses 11 elephants, four hoolock gibbons that howl loudly and swing from branches as I walk past their enclosure, and four leopards, three of which are sisters that were rescued as cubs from a tea plantation after their mother was killed by villagers and hung from a tree.

Barman and his staff of two veterinarians and 11 animal keepers not only rescue and treat these displaced animals, but also strive to return them to the wild. For the rhino babies, this involves years of painstaking effort.

“The rhino calves we rescue are usually very, very young,” Barman said. “They get separated from their mothers during floods and get stranded here and there. If we don’t rescue them, the babies will either be killed by predators or will die due to other causes.”

Rescuing stranded rhinos

Usually, it is the local communities living around Kaziranga that inform the forest department staff or WTI team about animals that may have strayed.

Kaziranga is home to nearly 2,500 greater one-horned rhinoceros. With a navigable river and highway for its boundaries, it is unsurprising that some of these animals frequently wander out of the park in search of food, water or space. In such cases, the local communities become the eyes and ears of CWRC’s rescue and rehabilitation work, Barman said.

In the beginning, people wanted to kill wild animals that strayed into their villages, he added, but with persistent awareness campaigns they have become a crucial part of the rescue process.

Uttam Saikia, a local journalist and resident, and currently Kaziranga’s Honorary Wildlife Warden, has helped create a network of concerned villagers living on the fringes of the park who keep track of rhinos that get stranded within villages or tea estates. “We monitor their movements and inform the Forest Department to send some forest guards, and with their help, we try to send the rhinos back into the park,” he said.

The situation gets worse during the monsoons. Hundreds of rhinos scramble to escape, some ending up outside the park, near or within dense human habitation.

This is a big problem, Rohini Saikia, the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of Kaziranga said. “These rhinos can then become a target for poachers.”

Poaching remains one of the biggest threats to the rhinos in Kaziranga. In 2016, poachers killed 18 rhinos in the park, hacking off their horns for Chinese markets.

Because of this threat, the first preference is to ensure that the wandering rhinos return to the national park, Saikia said. “During flood season, because many rhinos stray out, we have to deploy our staff towards every rhino. If we fall short, we request staff from neighboring divisions to help us.”

The Assam Forest Department does not have a specialized rescue team, he added, but they work with the villagers, local police and the WTI team at CWRC to rescue the animals and send them back.

While healthy adult rhinos can be coaxed back into the park, injured adults, and orphaned babies are usually rescued and sent to the rehabilitation center. During the floods, this can entail traveling through water-logged villages by boat and pulling stranded babies on board.

“In the middle of the flood, we cannot tranquilize any animal, so we have to physically restrain the baby rhinos by putting some nets or noose around them,” Barman said. “Once they are physically restrained, we can immediately take them away to our center. If the rhino calf is older, then we have to judge the situation. A six-month-old rhino can easily kill a human. It can break your ribs. So, we wait for the right moment, then rescue them.”

Once the babies arrive at the rehabilitation center, the WTI team hand-raises them until they are about three to four years old, big enough to survive in the wild on their own.