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Searching for Nigeria’s last wild lions
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UNDER a starless night sky in Yankari Game Reserve, Martial Kiki stands on the back of a battered pick-up truck searching for the last lions in Nigeria.
From the white Toyota Hilux, the 31-year-old researcher from Benin plays the sound of a buffalo calf over a megaphone.
In theory, the lions are supposed to hear the buffalo and come for an easy meal. Then Kiki would shine a floodlight on the hungry, nocturnal cats and count them for a population estimate.
But despite broadcasting 29 hours of calls and trekking 150 kilometers through Yankari, Kiki hasn’t seen one lion yet.
“I expected to see more than this,” Kiki said.
“The situation has become worse. There has been no response, no tracks,” he said.
Urgent situation
“In five, 10 years, lions can disappear completely from Nigeria,” said Kiki.
There are only two areas in Nigeria home to lions: Kainji Lake National Park, in the northwest, where some 30 cats are living, and Yankari, where researchers believe there are just under five.
With chronic mismanagement in the past and underfunding, Yankari today is struggling to attract the funds it needs to preserve its last lions.
“Yankari is one of the few areas where fencing makes sense because the situation is so urgent,” said Philipp Henschel, a survey coordinator at the lion conservation organization Panthera.
To protect the animals and allow rangers to patrol more efficiently, fences need to be built around the perimeter of the park, he added.
“We know how to conserve cats,” he said. “We just need money to do it.”
Kiki has to go through the whole park for his surveys, even though he knows that in the searing heat of March, when there is no rain, the lions are probably closer to the river to hunt thirsty prey.
Field work is difficult. Unmaintained roads render swathes of the reserve inaccessible to rangers’ patrol vehicles, which gun-toting, machete-wielding poachers who hunt on foot exploit.
Kiki is escorted at all times by six armed rangers, who have had to defend him more than once during his buffalo calls.
“We shot to scare them but instead of them trying to run away, they shot us,” he laughed before adding more seriously: “I used to like camping in the bush but now I think it’s too dangerous.”
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