India's Uttar Pradesh Forest Department is delighted after six Nepali rhinos that used to stray from their home in Sukhlaphanta Wildlife Reserve have decided to stay on in India. Normally, there wouldn't be such a fuss as rhinos regularly travel to and from forest corridors between the two countries in the tarai. But the itinerant rhinos have confirmed their permanent residency as one female has given birth to a baby. It's a "landmark" event says a Times of India report given that the Great Indian Rhinoceros was on the verge of extinction in India, hunted by poachers for the horn, considered an aphrodisiac. In 1984, India launched an ambitious project under which a few rhinos from the resident populace in Assam were released in the Dudhwa National Park in Lakhimpur district of UP. Today, the number in Dudhwa has increased considerably, but the rhinos are kept in a fenced-in area. Which is why the arrival of the visitors from Nepal in the Pilibhit Reserve Forest, which adjoins Sukhlaphanta and is home to other endangered species such as the sloth bear and the swamp deer, is a pleasant surprise.

But not everyone is so sure of the number. "The Indian forestry officials must have counted three rhinos that wander the corridor twice. As far as we know, only three rhinos wander into India, and Nepali rhinos are all radioed and marked, so we know just where they are," says Surya Bahadur Pandey who worked at Sukhlaphanta until a few months ago. Last year, five rhinos were translocated to the reserve in Far West Nepal. There, too, one female has given birth to a calf. Conservationists say they don't mind where the rhinos live, India or Nepal as long as they are conserved.