HWANGE NATIONAL PARK, Zimbabwe -- Ecologist Stewart Towindo raises the antenna into the air and listens to the beeps from his radio receiver. Silently, he indicates the direction.
Veteran tracker Million Sibanda lets some sand drift through his fingers to make sure that the smells of human sweat and 'D sunscreen are still downwind. He notes a few fresh tracks in the dirt.
Then he smiles and points up ahead. There they were, rhinoceroses No. 21 and No. 24, munching on leaves and branches and moving through the thick bush with graceful ease.
A close encounter with a rhino is perhaps the most striking moment of a trip into the African bush, evoking a time in the distant evolutionary past when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
But, when it comes to winning sympathy in the international conservation community, the solitary, stoic rhino has an image problem.
"The rhinoceros just can't compete for charisma with the elephant," says Glen Tatham, chief warden of Zimbabwe's parks. "What gets to me is that the rhinoceros does no one any harm, doesn't . . . trample down fences or disturb agriculture. And yet man is about to wipe these animals out."
The elephant does all those destructive things, regularly ruining a year's harvest in a night of foraging among villages near game parks.
Yet among those who pay any attention to the fate of African wildlife, it is the elephant that gets the most sympathy.
"I think it's because people identify with the elephant," said Drew Conybeare, a rhino conservation consultant to the Zimbabwe Parks Department. "Their life span is about the same as humans'. They have matriarchal family units. People respond to that."
That is why the elephant is once again expected to dominate the agenda of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a two-week biannual conference that has drawn representatives from over 122 countries to its current meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Ivory ban opposed
In a highly publicized move five years ago, CITES banned international trade in ivory to combat elephant poaching. Animal rights groups trumpet the ban as a resounding success.
But countries in southern Africa oppose the ban because it eliminates an important revenue source for conservation efforts to cull the herds and help protect the species.
This year, South Africa is asking CITES to allow it to trade in non-ivory elephant products, a proposal that is likely to attract the most attention at the conference.
But, consider this: Africa has 600,000 elephants; it has fewer than 3,000 black rhinos like Nos. 21 and 24, down from 65,000 in 1970.
This cow and her calf get their rather prosaic names from the frequency emitted by the small radio transmitters strapped to their necks.
Just 300 left
It is one of the ways Zimbabwe is trying to protect the 300 black rhinos left in this country, down from 2,000 just three years ago. That's when the poachers finished off Zambia's rhinos and began moving across the Zambezi River into Zimbabwe.
They kill the rhinos for their horns. Ground into a fine powder, rhino horn -- basically keratin, the stuff of human fingernails -- is thought in the Far East to have medicinal powers.
Trade in rhino horn has been banned for almost two decades by CITES but the ban has failed because for impoverished Africans the business is too lucrative.
Powdered horn goes for about $3,000 a pound in Taiwan, many times the annual income of many Africans.
Blamed for decline
"I can't see how CITES had done the rhino any good at all," said Norman English, chief warden at the Sinamatella camp in this national park. "Right about the time they put in that ban is when the population really started declining."
If this really is the black rhino's last stand, then Mr. English is a rather pessimistic Custer.
He is in charge of one of Zimbabwe's four Intensive Protection Zones (IPZ), areas in national parks where about half the country's rhinos get special attention. The rest are on private land.
All have been darted with drugs, fitted with radio collars and been de-horned. They get beefed-up armed patrols designed to stop poaching. No Zimbabwean rhinos have been poached since the IPZs were set up earlier this year.
But Mr. English said that he needs more than 60 people to adequately protect the 50 or so rhinos in his 650-square-mile zone. His budget gives him about half that number, with little money to equip them adequately.
Decisions are political
Mr. English complains that he could have enough scouts, all properly equipped, for the price of a few of the CITES delegates' airline fares to Fort Lauderdale.
What irks many in Zimbabwe's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management is their belief that CITES makes decisions not on the basis of what's best for the animals, but on the basis of what's best for the politicians.
They contend that many votes of CITES representatives are driven by the political clout of animal welfare groups that generate a lot of publicity, and attract a lot of donations, by selling a Disney-like view of the animals that has little to do with the realities in Africa.
Indeed, because the animal welfare groups are such effective political lobbyists, many African conservationists feel they are being dictated to by the industrialized Western states -- countries that long ago wiped out their large mammal populations.
"This is an African problem and it's going to have to be solved by Africans," said Robbie Robinson, who heads South Africa's system of national parks.
The argument of the southern African states is that if you put an economic value on animals such as the elephant and the rhino, through the regulation of trade and hunting as well as game park tourism, the people in these countries will see that they thrive.
"The fact is that wherever animals have an economic value, conservation of them increases," Dr. Robinson said.
Zimbabwean officials point out that if they could sell the four tons of rhino horn and 30 tons of ivory that sit in a huge locked warehouse at the park department's Harare headquarters, there would be no trouble meeting the department's budget for decades.
That said, few advocate a sudden elimination of the rhino-horn ban simply because the state of the animal is so precarious.
Not enforced
Supporters of the horn trade ban say that it has failed because it has never really been enforced, particularly at the consumer end.
Those who argue the rhino-horn ban will never work contend that the millenniums-old belief in its medicinal qualities makes progress on the consumption end difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible, particularly in Asian countries where the environmental lobby has little political clout.
There has been a recent increase in consumer enforcement measures, including trade sanctions by the United States against countries that allow the rhino-horn trade.
But Dr. Tatham, Zimbabwe's chief warden, argues that the ban has simply driven the trade underground where it can't be monitored.
"The problem is that biologists have been studying the issue when what we need are economists," said Dick Pitman, chairman of the Zambezi Society, a Zimbabwe-based conservation group.
At what price?
"We really don't know what would happen if you lifted the ban or what price you should set for legal trade in rhino horn -- high, to earn money, or low, to disrupt the illegal trade," he said. "We have to find out before we decide what to do."
The main efforts of Dr. Pitman's Zambezi Society are much more practical, such as getting a couple of barrels of gasoline delivered so that scouts can go out on patrols.
$1,000 to de-horn
It was a lack of fuel that caused Zimbabwe to halt scouting for a few months last year just after it had de-horned its rhinos at a cost of $1,000 per animal. When the scouts got back in the bush, they found that poachers had killed scores of animals, de-horned or not.
This caused many to declare de-horning a failure, but parks officials argue that it always had to go hand-in-hand with increased enforcement, raising the risks for poachers while reducing their rewards. Since that has been the case in the IPZs, poaching has been stemmed.
Even so, few think that IPZs are a permanent solution. "Is this the way we want to go in Africa?" asked Rowan Martin, deputy director of research for Zimbabwe's parks.
"Do we want a few state-protected areas with men with fixed bayonets all along the perimeter, facing out, stopping the ravenous hordes from getting at the precious animals?" he said. "One would like to find another solution."
Farming rhinos
The one Dr. Martin has in mind seems radical to many. He proposes farming rhinos, harvesting their horns -- which grow back in two years -- and selling them through a regulated trade. On a dollar-per-acre basis, he argues, rhinoceroses should displace cattle as Africa's primary livestock.
The profits, under his vision, would be plowed back into wildlife, perhaps protecting a number of rhinoceroses in parks where their trademark horns could grow into their full splendor. For now, though, visitors lucky enough to encounter a rhino at a Zimbabwe park will see one like Nos. 21 and 24, their horns reduced to a sad stump.
"If tourists see the rhinoceros like this, perhaps it will make them more aware of this animal's desperate plight," Dr. Conybeare said.
Warden English was as blunt as the horn stub. "I hope they don't see any rhino," he said of visitors to his park. "Because if they do, they might start talking about it, and then the poachers might find out where the animals are."