Gabon: The Last Eden | National Geographic

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poachers supplying the lucrative ivory
trade use these same trails to track
down their quarry
and when they do the outcome can be
horrific
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but not every human use of the elephant
trails is destructive indigenous peoples
have traveled these ball ways for at
least 9,000 years and in 1999 wildlife
conservation society researcher Mike Fay
embarked on a 2,000 mile trek across
Central Africa his chief purpose to draw
attention to the threats facing the
region’s wildlife his primary means of
travel the elephant trails
he called his journey the mega transect
halfway through Mike stumbled onto a
poaching camp and found himself staring
at a gruesome scene this wasn’t
subsistence hunting the meat was headed
for local logging and mining camps what
Mike saw on the mega transect would turn
out to have far-reaching and unexpected
consequences together with WCS ecologist
Lee white Mike presented President Omar
Bongo ondimba with a plan to create 13
national parks the president said yes
for me when Bongo said he was going to
do it it wasn’t even like a dream come
true it was like winning the 256 million
dollar lottery setting up the parks was
a promising start but only a start
Gabonese conservationists joined forces
with the Wildlife Conservation Society
or WCS and created Park management teams
like operation Luang go one of the first
problems they faced was pervasive animal
poaching it remains a serious problem
today
all across Central Africa elephants are
hunted and killed for their ivory
while local poachers profit very little
from what they kill the tusks of a
single large bull can bring thousands of
dollars on the Asian open market
so anti-poaching forces face an uphill
struggle
after discovering an elephant massacre
nears Akuma National Park and southern
Chad Mike Fay is determined to learn
more
he knows that especially in war-torn
nations like Chad national parks alone
can’t stem the tide of widespread
poaching