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Conservation Tag

the sound of conservation

Cornell University’s Elephant Listening Project and WCS-Congo are launching a new study using hidden microphones in the forest to better monitor forest elephant populations and movements, pinpoint the gunshots of poachers, and record the biodiversity in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Congo. Any animal (including humans) that makes a loud noise can be detected and recorded by the acoustic devices. Elephants are exceptionally good subjects for acoustic...

Hippos in the rainforest

A team of 6 six rangers congregated in the Joint Operations Centre at Bomassa Park HQ. Maps and photos taken during patrol flickered across the monitor screen as Christian Molango, the patrol leader, detailed what they encountered as they scouted along the banks of the Ndoki river. Then, something unusual caught everyone’s attention – a pair of hippos appeared on the screen....

Conkouati-Douli’s turtle guardians

On October 01-03 2016 the WCS Conkouati-Douli National Park team co-sponsored with Congolese NGO RENATURA a training session in the village of Belello for the teams which will monitor and protect Congo’s beaches during the current marine turtle nesting season. Forty-eight trainees (30 from WCS Conkouati and 18 from RENATURA) spent two days learning how to identify the different turtle species that frequent Congo’s...

mitigating human-elephant conflict in Bambama

WCS’s community development team is working with farmers in the periphery of the proposed Ogooué Leketi National Park to reduce the impacts of elephant crop raiding. Over recent years, the communities in the district of Bambama have suffered increasingly from incidents of crop raiding. Local farmers are exasperated by the problem, and can resort to desperate measures to protect their fields, with serious consequences for...

Dismantling northern Congo’s trafficking networks

The fight to protect northern Congo’s forest elephants has reached boiling point. In the past two months 32 poachers have been arrested, over 100 kilograms of ivory seized and six semi-automatic weapons detained across the Ndoki landscape. This includes the arrest of an ivory trafficker tied to one the most notorious poaching rings in northern Congo. ...

world elephant day 2016

Over the last decade central Africa has lost 60% of its elephants; a staggering loss owed mainly to the unrelenting ivory trade. World Elephant Day offers a critical opportunity to take stock of their plight whilst also recognizing the hard work teams of men and woman are putting in in the field to protect these giants across their range. ...

the ndoki experience

Our latest video, 'The Ndoki Experience' showcases the incredible diversity of the pristine forest of Nouabale-Ndoki National Park. The park, created in 1993, spans 4,238.7 km2 in the northwestern corner of the Republic of Congo and is a rare example of an intact forest wilderness, completely uninhabited by human settlers and with low human population densities in the surrounding area. The forest is part...

Putting Ecoguards inREACH

Christian and Brel are ecoguards working for the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Northern Congo. Their job is highly varied – from manning strategic check points on logging roads to conducting river patrols in search of illegal wildlife traffickers operating in the areas around the Park....

Bonye’s many visitors

The first quarter of 2016 saw the official start of the forest elephant-monitoring programme at Bonye bai, a remote forest clearing in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park. A team of WCS researchers and trackers headed out to the bai to construct a basic observation platform in February. The mission and construction of this tower, built to aid bai observation efforts, was covered in a mini-documentary ‘The...

A growing engagement

Say 'Congo' and most people will think of thick, impenetrable forests. Few people realise that one third of Congo's surface area is covered by savannah. The WCS Batéké project works in the area around the Lefini reserve in central Congo. Trees cover only about 20% of the landscape, meaning that the wooded areas are increasingly under pressure from a growing human population. The reserve was...