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Just last Saturday I took a routine reconnaissance flight over Wonga Wongue, the Presidential Reserve on Gabon’s relatively pristine coastline. We were flying kind of high but were seeing small groups of three to ten elephants in the open savannas. The sun was going down, the grass shimmering gold, and I was happy to be watching tranquil elephants.
Then I saw it, barely visible, a round dimple in the grass with a gray dot in the middle. Immediately I knew it was a poached elephant. We flew to the spot and, sure enough, there it was: a young bull with his head chopped off, trunk sliced free, and skull busted open to remove the tusks. He hadn’t been there for more than a couple of days. We flew wider circles and found five more carcasses. The poachers were probably still in the park.
I have seen so many dead elephants in the past 30 years that the sight from the air will never leave me. It was deja vu from 2011, when we found a similar, larger massacre in the same location.
Next day we headed out to the scene. It was obvious that these guys were pros. They knew where to shoot, how to decapitate the elephants and remove the tusks in no time flat. We inspected the carcasses. All were young males, barely ten years old. One elephant had buckshot through the head to finish it off. Another had had its achilles tendon sliced through to keep it from running away. The blood was still fresh.
WCS photo by J. Michael Fay
We found the tracks of five men and followed them east of the park toward a lake that would have led to the poachers to the Ogooue River and beyond. Two of the sets of tracks were deeply indented from the weight of ivory being carried. These guys got away.
There are no more big tuskers in this park. Twenty years ago there were a few hundred.
For the past three years we have witnessed here in Gabon what we always feared would happen: When the vast majority of elephants in all of West and central Africa were killed, the poachers would descend on Gabon. We would see the forests emptied of elephants, as we have witnessed in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Chinese demand for ivory would quickly take up from slackening demand in the West.
Our worst nightmare for elephants is coming true in Gabon, and for those of us on the ground the figure of 11,000 lost in a decade comes as no surprise at all.
Our worst nightmare for elephants is coming true in Gabon, and for those of us on the ground the figure of 11,000 lost in a decade comes as no surprise at all.
We have been saying it for so long that we are numb: People should not consume ivory, period.
What sickness of greed and vanity is it that drives human beings to commit this slaughter? Here in Gabon we get little help. We are trying to keep up, buying vehicles, sending soldiers into the forest, hiring guards. But there are hundreds of poachers. Only a concerted resolution from the United Nations, and direct assistance, will solve this problem.
If we can find hundreds of millions of dollars to fight terrorism in Mali, we should be able to find the resources to combat this last big push by poachers, which may well be the final blow to a species that has just about gone extinct in the majority of countries where it once ranged.
The surveys of Gabon’s Minkebe National Park were undertaken by WCS, WWF, and Gabon’s National Parks Agency and funded by ANPN, the CITES MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) Program, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
