The squeals of a warthog blast from loudspeakers and echo through the trees as Kris Everatt tries to lure in a lion to be darted and radio-collared. He pauses the recorded cries, and the team goes back to waiting sleepily in the truck.
Seemingly out of nowhere, we hear paws crunching through dry leaves close by. We’ve been here all night, staking out the bait, but are suddenly very awake.
Then, silence. Everatt, a Canadian biologist with the wild cat conservancy Panthera who has worked in Africa for more than a decade, has the vacant, intent expression of someone trying to see with his ears.
To my surprise, he begins huffing the deep grunting purrs of a contented lion. The ruse works, and the invisible animal sets to feasting on the bait, a hunk of meat and guts tied to a tree a hundred feet away. Through the dark, we hear sinew tearing and bones splintering.
We’re in the far southeastern corner of Senegal, in the little-known Niokolo-Koba National Park, a 3,500-square-mile reserve that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. The nation’s park service and Panthera are in a race here to save roughly 30 critically endangered West African lions from local extinction.
West African lions were recognized only recently as more closely related to Asiatic lions in India than to those of the southern African savannas. Indeed, compared to their relatives, the cats of West Africa are taller and more muscular, and they lack those hallmark luxurious manes.
The last holdout lions in Niokolo-Koba are threatened by poaching of the animals they prey on, such as antelope and buffalo. Conservationists worry that the lions themselves are vulnerable too: Lion skins, teeth, claws, and meat all fetch high prices, mostly in Africa and Asia, where lion bone is a substitute for increasingly rare wild tiger bone in traditional medicine.
It’s difficult to say how many West African lions have been lost to poaching. What is known is that their original range has shrunk by 99 percent, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation status of species.
In Niokolo-Koba, poaching, the expansion of farming, and the increasing incidence of wildfires led UNESCO in 2007 to add the park to its list of World Heritage in Danger. Meanwhile, artisanal goldmining nearby has intensified the pressures.
“There are problems to be solved,” says Jacques Gomis, the head of the park. “We want to get the park off the red list. The goal is 2024.”
Across West Africa, there are only between 121 and 374 mature lions, according to Philipp Henschel, Panthera’s director for the region and head of the project in Niokolo-Koba, who began surveying lions in the park in 2011. In addition to the Senegal lions, a number live in the conflict-ridden W-Arly-Pendjari transboundary reserve, where Niger, Benin, and Burkina Faso meet; others survive in two very small parks in Nigeria. When Henschel began studying Niokolo-Koba’s lions (to date, he’s conducted two surveys), he estimated that there were only about a dozen cats and none of the park’s rangers had ever even seen a lion, he says.
“We’re in danger of watching one little population after another blink out,” Henschel says of West Africa’s lions, “then we’ll only be left with a few in southern Africa.” During the past two decades, the continent’s overall lion population has dropped by half. Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but there are probably somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 wild lions today.
This is why it’s so important to study Niokolo-Koba’s lions right now, Henschel says. “We have to be faster than the poachers.”
He and Everatt think the park can support between 180 and 240 lions. Panthera and the park service are aiming for that number because recovery of this apex predator will help the revival of its entire ecosystem.
“We select lions not just because they’re really cool, and we love lions—which is definitely true—but also because they play such a key role in a functioning ecosystem,” Everatt says. “They also serve as an umbrella species,” he says, because to protect an apex predator you have to protect everything below them on the food chain.
‘Still a blind spot’
The Gambia and Niokolo rivers nourish a diverse landscape of forests, plateaus, and valleys. The park harbors not only to the world’s northernmost and westernmost populations of lions, chimpanzees, and elephants but also Lord Derby elands, wild dogs, leopards, hyenas, baboons, kobas (the roan antelope for which the park is named), some 60 other species of mammals, and more than 300 kinds of birds.
Yet Niokolo-Koba—and its few lions—remains terra incognita. “From a scientific perspective, it’s still a blind spot,” Henschel says. “There’s still so much more that we want and need to learn”—especially about the lions if they’re to be saved.
Africa’s savanna lions are well studied, but with West African cats, everything from pride size and range to diet and mating behavior await scientific documentation. Fitting lions with GPS collars, which are funded by the National Geographic Society, is essential for gathering varied information about them—that’s why Everatt and the team have been waiting all night for a lion to come feed on the bait.
As the lion eats, Mouhamadou Ndiaye, a field assistant with Panthera, slowly lowers his flashlight. The moment the pale beam finds the cat, Everatt squeezes the trigger of his dart gun. There’s a puff, and the lion falls asleep. Everatt drives over, gets out, and tosses a twig at one leg. The lion doesn’t budge.
I’m quietly lowering my foot to the sandy road when Everatt urgently orders, “Get back in the truck. The whole pride is here.”
This lion, a female, is young, which means the other members of her family are almost certainly nearby. It also means Everatt won’t put a collar on her: She’ll outgrow it too quickly in the coming months. The Panthera team has collared eight males so far, but only one female, Florence. As blue morning light fills the forest, Everatt injects her with the antidote, and as soon as she stands up, she starts eating again.
Filling in the lion family tree
Henschel and his Panthera colleagues are fighting tenaciously to ensure that West Africa’s little lion populations don’t “blink out.” Conservation isn’t the only goal. As Henschel worked his way across the forests of West Africa searching for lion enclaves, he collected genetic samples that are helping to expand our understanding of the lion family tree.
In May, Laura Bertola, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, and her colleagues published a study describing their sequencing of the genome of lions throughout Africa and in a reserve in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Their work shows that lions in West Africa are more closely related to the cats in India than to those in southern Africa. It formalizes a new division between “northern lions” (Panthera leo leo) in India and West Africa and “southern lions” (Panthera leo melanochaita) in southern Africa.
“We didn’t come up with a new subspecies or anything like that,” Bertola says. “We just redrew the boundaries. Instead of having an Africa-Asia distinction, which was the case previously, we now have this northern-southern distinction, which is in line with the evolutionary history of the species.”
Although southern lions can breed with northern ones, Henschel says, it would be a mistake to bring southerners to Niokolo-Koba to replenish the population: It would undermine their genetic uniqueness. This makes it even more urgent to save the Niokolo-Koba lions, he says.
“I had a map pinned to the wall,” Bertola says. “Every time [Henschel] reported back, there were, unfortunately, more populations that I could cross off the map. So, I had a map that slowly filled with red crosses, because lion presence couldn’t be reconfirmed in those areas. It was quite depressing.”
