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Lions Begin Long Road to Recovery in Senegal’s Yellowstone — A Defiant Roar in a Troubled Region

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Story at a glance…

  • West African lions are slowly growing in number in the massive Niokolo Koba National Park, Senegal.

  • Panthera’s conservation efforts is creating the only growing population of West African lions, a subspecies at high risk of extinction.

  • Poaching from poor villages, meat traders, criminal gangs, and terrorist cells threaten the ultra-rare cat across the region.

Despite being the second-largest national park in West Africa at 9,000 square kilometers, or equal to the size of Yellowstone, only 30 to 40 of the maybe-less-than 400 West African lions on earth live in Senegal’s Niokolo Koba National Park.

Now, a historic first-time capture of 6 adult lions has allowed conservationists to attach GPS collars to them, in order to provide important data on their home ranges, and hunting grounds.

The project is a support effort of Senegal’s Parks Department (DNP) organized by the conservation NGO Panthera, a world leader in the conservation of wildcats both big and small. Their on-the-ground work has led to a doubling in the number of lions in the park, from 10-15 to as many as 40, over the last ten years.

“Some call it the West African lion, and genetically it is distinct from those in east and southern Africa, but so are those from the Sahelian belt north of the Congo Basin,” explains Dr. Philip Henschel, Panthera West and Central Africa Regional Director. “The West African lions are part of this Northern lion subspecies, as are the extinct Barbary lions that used to populate the Atlas Mountains, as are the remaining lions in India”.

“Of the 20,000 lions remaining in the world today, only about 10% are part of the Northern lion subspecies”.

Recently, under cover of darkness, rangers from the DNP and Panthera biologists tracked lions in the park for three months during 2021 and 2022, luring them close enough for a tranquilizing dart. Among their successfully-collared targets were two of the resident pride leaders, a female in prime breeding years, and a juvenile who would have certainly died from extensive porcupine quill wounds had the team not stumbled upon her.

PICTURED: A young female who accompanies the collared lioness named Flo. Panthera believe she could be Flo’s daughter.

Out of the shadows

“They were never collared before so we know almost nothing about these cats,” Henschel told WaL. “They were never seen. Back in the days in 2011 when we did the first survey there, I had a team of 4 people all part of the parks staff, and of them nobody had ever seen a lion. One of them, a driver, had already worked in the park for 10 years; he had never seen a lion”.

“The dart guns that we use—the dart only flies 40 meters [maximum] and it’s better to get within 20 meters. So driving around during the day and trying to dart them we just had no luck,” says Henschel. “We gave it a shot but they are still so, so rare and if you see them it’s just a short glimpse”.

Sitting in complete darkness, the team used a combination of roadkill bait, thermal imaging scopes, and the recorded calls of a wounded prey animal to lure lions in.

The GPS data retrieved is already yielding crucial information to the project, including leading program staff to kill sites to identify favored prey species, and an understanding that all the lions have a strong preference for a single limited area—a protected core in the heart of the park, and the only place the shoe-string budget ranger force had been able to effectively police before Panthera arrived.

“To protect this entire area, the park authorities had at their disposal about $150,000. The effort that they made was incredibly commendable,” says Henschel. “They did a bit of triage, and that was the situation we found. Lions were only huddled around a tiny core area, around 10% of the park”.

In 2017, with financial assistance from donors, they were able to add an additional anti-poaching team of 10 rangers, and equip them with comms, vehicles, and the necessary training to do the job. In 2022, Panthera are able to add another two groups, Henschel reports.

It was much-needed support, as in the first 6 months of 2017, the new team found 40 poaching camps. Gradually by increasing the footprint of the rangers, they are bringing lions, as well as their prey, into more and more areas building out from that protected center.

PICTURED: A park wildlife vet removes porcupine quills from the face of a juvenile lioness the team found during the final night of the collaring project. They believe they saved her life, as she was underfed, and likely found it impossible to eat because of the quills.

An uncertain future

Slowly the lions are moving out of Niokolo Koba’s heart, particularly to the southeast, and establishing new territories. Panthera’s vision there is to bring lions back to “carrying capacity” which means every suitable part of the park that can support lions has them in abundance. This, Henschel believes, could amount to around 200-250 lions for a park of this size.

It’s about the only place in West Africa the future looks bright for the West African lion. Three other populations exist beyond Niokolo Koba, including two critical populations in two separate game reserves in Nigeria, harboring perhaps 20 between them.

Last is a tri-country protected area called W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) Protected Area Complex, split between Burkina Faso, Benin, and Niger, in which 90% of all the remaining West African lions can be found. The Pendjari section in Benin recently received $23 million in support from the Benin Government, National Geographic, and the Wildcat and Wyss foundations for conservation and revitalization efforts.

Despite this support, the area is facing a threat conservationists are seldom able to counter.

“The problem is that 40% of that landscape is on the Burkina Faso side, and there’s a West African split off of ISIS in that area, Boko Haram is pressing in from the Nigeran side, so the security situation is a nightmare,” Henschel said. “Based on information from lions collared on the Benin side by African Parks, we know that a good percentage of these lions that are collared—once they go across to the Burkina Faso side they are immediately killed”.

“In 2012 when I surveyed the entire landscape for lions about 120 of the 300 lions were on the Burkina Faso side, and we have no idea if there are any lions left. Because of the terrorist threat, the parks are no longer actively managed”.

By contrast in Niokolo Koba, the poaching problem is not as serious. Poor locals occasionally enter the park to poach animals for food, but are easily dissuaded by the increase in security, as are regionally-organized teams of poachers, normally armed with 12-gauge shotguns entering to hunt for the bushmeat trade, who usually lay down their weapons if caught.

PICTURED: While searching for lions during the nights the team encountered this beautiful young female leopard. Niokolo Koba National Park may contain west Africa’s largest population of leopards.

“There are also groups that hunt predominantly with automatic rifles, if they see one of the last remaining elephants they’ll take that, they go after hippos as well for the set of hippo ivory, and they will go after big cats as well,” said Henschel. “If they are detected by patrol teams, more often than running away they will open fire on the rangers”.

Henschel hopes to use outreach, trying to recruit people to convert these dangerous individuals in the communities in which they live, or even to utilize a budding informant network.

“It’s difficult to make arrests but we are trying to tackle this problem from a different angle”.

In addition to studying the lions, Panthera’s work in one of the finest intact West African ecosystems has revealed that Niokolo Koba contains the last population in West Africa of wild hunting dogs, the largest West African population of leopards, and the first park sighting of a bull elephant in many years.

Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Niokolo Koba could benefit enormously from an expanded ecotourist infrastructure to enjoy the beauty and biodiversity of the region. Because of the lack of tourists however, few utilities, tracks, campsites, telecommunications, or other resources are available to anti-poaching teams traversing the mammoth landscape. WaL

 

PICTURED ABOVE: Panthera’s Kris Everatt and Phil Henschel and a Senegal Department of National Parks staff member with an anesthetized and collared lion in Niokolo Koba National Park, Senegal, 2021.

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About Post Author

Andy Corbley

Corbley@worldatlarge.news
https://www.worldatlarge.news
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