Niokolo-Koba is a park whose animals are counted one at a time. It is nine thousand square kilometres of savanna along the upper Gambia in south-eastern Senegal, one of the largest unbroken blocks left in West Africa. What lives out there is thin on the ground and mostly rare. The western giant eland, the largest antelope on Earth, a bull carrying spiralled horns close to a metre long, still runs wild here and in no other park. The critically endangered West African lion keeps one of its last strongholds in the same bush, spread far too thinly to promise anyone a sighting. Boats go out from Simenti onto a river lined with borassus fan palms, hippos surfacing midstream and crocodiles sliding off the sandbars. This far above its estuary the Gambia is still narrow enough that you can hear the far bank.
The laterite tracks out of Simenti follow the river through that forest and out onto the floodplain, and the first hour of light is when everything is moving. By mid-morning the heat has sent most of it back into the shade. The pond below the hotel runs a procession of its own through the dry months, and if you sit out an hour with the engine off, the animals stop caring that you are there. On foot you go only in a ranger's company, which turns out to be the point, because they read the tracks, the dung and the alarm calls a vehicle drowns out. The same bush holds chimpanzees. The apes around Mont Assirik live in the hottest, driest and most open country the species occupies anywhere, at the north-western edge of its range. What the counting has not been able to fix is the elephants. Hundreds ranged here once. By 2019 five to ten were left, and then the cameras went quiet for six years. In June 2025 one of them filmed a bull walking through the dark — thirty-five or forty years old, known to the rangers as Ousmane, and possibly the only one there is.