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The jungle was so thick that Emmanuel Olabode found the elephants he was hunting only when the great matriarch's sniffing horn approached close enough to almost touch him.
"She beat her ears, blocking us to keep her family, and then left in peace," recalls Olabode. "It was extraordinary."
The elusive elephants are located just 100 kilometers from downtown Lagos, Nigeria's economic capital, which has more than 20 million inhabitants.
"They are afraid of humans," said Olabode, who heads the Forest Elephant Initiative, a conservation group located in the Omo Forest, northeast of the largest city in Africa. . "Then they are active at night."
Forest elephants are the shy relations of their savannah cousins and are experts in concealment; so clever, in fact, very few people in the city know them.
The densely populated concrete jungle of Lagos is better known for its wild nightlife than for its nocturnal wildlife.
"When people hear about elephants, they do not believe it," said Joy Adeosun, a government scientist working for Olabode.
"They are in shock," says Adeosun, repairing a motion-sensitive camera that has not only captured elephants, but also antelopes, buffaloes and chimpanzees.
Last virgin rainforest
Omo, which sprawled over some 1,325 square kilometers of the southwestern state of Ogun, was protected as a government reserve nearly a century ago.
UNESCO's "Biosphere Reserve" of global significance, it is one of the last islets of pristine virgin forest in Nigeria.
Nigeria's deforestation rates are among the highest in the world, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
"Cutting down trees is easy," says Olabode, whose team of eight rangers is overburdened.
"But if the forest disappears, the whole ecosystem changes, the rains fall, so the farms lose their fertility, everyone suffers."
Half of the forest, which covers an area of 650 km 2, is reserved for wildlife and slaughter is prohibited.
But corruption is endemic.
"There are so many trees here," says Ibiyinka James, embarked on one of the dozens of illegally laden trucks of old hardwoods to become planks for the burgeoning market of construction in the country. more populated Africa.
"Birds can fly to another forest," he adds.
And with cleared trees, farmers plant crops.
"I have to support my family, what else can I do?" Explains Christopher Shadrach, a cocoa farmer from Ose-Eke, one of the villages leaving the reserve. , each sheltering hundreds of people.
But for elephants, crops are delicious treats, which worries farmers in the forest.
Packed their trunks
The researchers had feared that there was only a handful of elephants left. Then, in April 2018, elephants burst into the jungle.
The drivers braked sharply as the herds set off on a four-lane highway, while desperate elephant mothers tried to break through the central barriers to allow the babies to cross, the guards said.
"They were looking for a new home," says Olabode, suggesting that the explosions in the quarries could have been the final straw.
Many were hunted, although some found a happy hiding place even closer to the city.
Olabode now thinks that there might be a hundred elephants at Omo – but their remarkable survival is threatened as never before, their forest home being in danger.
Africa Nature Investors (ANI), a Nigerian conservation foundation, plans to develop ecotourism to protect the forest.
"It will provide alternative jobs," said Filip Van Trier, a Belgian businessman raised in Nigeria, in which he describes the financing proposals he directs for ANI, including the tripling of the number of guards. forest.
"But we must stop logging first.
"Forests are critical"
At dawn, in Omo, the chatter of the monkeys echoes on the treetops.
There is then the echo of a shot, signaling that a hunter is in the forest. Shortly after, the whine of the chainsaws begins.
Poachers and ivory merchants face five years in prison, if the laws were enforced.
In 2015, the Ministry of Environment developed an action plan to protect elephants, promising to crack down on a "large internal market for ivory".
Yet in Lagos, on the Jakande artisbad market in the middle clbad Lekki, a sculptor shows a commission that he realizes for a "big business man" – an ivory AK-47 miniature, the 39, the weapon of choice for poachers.
For urban businesses, wildlife may not be their primary concern, but preserving the jungle and keeping elephants safe is a problem for Lagos, a city devastated by floods.
"Forests are essential," says Shakirudeen Odunuga, of the University of Lagos, who is studying how forests prevent stormwater from breaking into low-lying suburbs built on restored wetlands.
"We are already experiencing severe floods."
The forests, the lungs of Lagos, also bring a rain that saves lives.
"Without them, the heat would be unbearable," adds Odunuga.
In Omo, Olabode and his small team walk daily through the forests, trying to stop his destruction.
"If we let the forest disappear, people will say, 'we should have protected the elephants,'" he said. "But by then, it will be too late."
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