They became the endangered ones.

A South African conservationist got a closer wildlife encounter than intended after he was charged by an angry black rhinoceros, which forced him to flee up a tree. The harrowing encounter occurred on Sept. 21, but the footage was only recently posted online, where it has since gone viral.

“I was just thrilled and so full of adrenaline from the encounter,” videographer Tom Frew, who’s a guide with Ranger Buck Safaris, told Compass Media of the close call, which occurred while he was trying to track down and tag white rhinos.

The 26-year-old’s team had reportedly learned that they were in the vicinity of a male African black rhino, which is “rarer” and “more aggressive” than its white counterpart, according to Frew.

And while this particular animal had its dangerous horns removed to deter poachers, it nonetheless posed a big threat to the trackers — especially as black rhinos can weigh up to 3,000 pounds. In addition, when black rhinos awake from being sedated, “they almost always choose fight instead of flight,” according to Frew.

Sure enough, after the intrepid crew tranquilized and collared the critically endangered beast, it made a beeline toward the rhino researchers, who dashed up trees to escape the enraged animal.

Frew, who hails from Cape Town, described the nail-biting moment: “As soon as the rhino came to, it caught the scent of my colleagues in the surrounding trees and rushed around furiously from tree to tree trying to even the odds with us after having ruined its morning.”

Accompanying POV footage, filmed from the tree, shows the hornless behemoth running toward the videographer, who is perched on an alarmingly skinny branch right above its head. The rampaging rhino stops short of the base and looks up at his target, before huffing and puffing emphatically as if daring Frew to come down. Thankfully for him, the animal eventually grows bored and trots out of frame.

“After what seemed like a lifetime, the animal finally gave up the chase and made its way back into the bush and we were left unscathed after what could have easily ended as another unusual African death statistic,” the relieved rhino tracker exclaimed. “We stayed in the tree for a few minutes after the animal disappeared just to be safe before finally making our way down and back towards the safety of the vehicles and continued with the rest of the collaring operation.”

Frew is especially lucky considering the tree he selected, in his haste to escape, was precariously spindly.

“It had a trunk not much thicker than my thigh and two lousy, low hanging branches that were just high enough to keep us out of reach from the rhino,” he lamented. “‘All that needed to happen was for the rhino to put even a little bit of its weight against the flimsy trunk and that would have been enough to send the whole tree toppling over with us inside of it.”

Frew, for one, is just grateful to be alive, saying: “It all just happened so fast that it was already over before we could even start to comprehend what had just happened and how lucky we were that things ended the way that they did.”

This isn’t the first time a person has had to go arboreal to survive an animal attack. In July, a Russian couple claims they spent ten days hiding in trees without food to escape a bear that was stalking them.