The appearance of the private Black Rhino Reserve and its luxury lodges in the northwest corner of a popular national park is in line with tourism and conservation trends in South Africa.

'There's a beauty," says Andrew Jackson as we exit a grove of tamboti trees and take in a large, wide-lipped pachyderm, horn cut and squared off, resting peacefully beneath a budding blackthorn tree.

Fewer than three hours from the concrete sprawl of Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Black Rhino Reserve is 2,000ha of private land in northwestern Pilanesberg with a handful of lodges within its boundaries.

Jackson is the resident ecologist. We've just returned from a firebreak, where a few lodge guides from the reserve volunteered their services to help Pilanesberg National Park staff fight a fire that had jumped from community grazing lands into the reserve overnight. The tension of the past hour is relieved by the young rhino bull's calmness, his poor eyesight not registering our presence yet.

When it gets up with a start, ears alert and ready to flee, I sink to my knee, lens extended, and shoot a few stills before settling in to observe a moment of magnificence. This large, unthreatening creature, perfect in its creases and curves - even without its horn - reminds me that Pilanesberg National Park was the last place I saw its temperamental black "cousin", that of the hooked...