Across Africa, giraffe populations are declining at an alarming rate. However, in Chad’s Zakouma National Park, which is now a sanctuary for wildlife, one giraffe subspecies has bounced back
Report and photographs by Daniel Allen
Late afternoon in Chad’s Zakouma National Park sees the air above Riguiek Pan dance in the furnace-like heat. Huge flocks of spur-winged geese, yellow-billed storks and black-crowned cranes have congregated in and around the pan’s shallow waters to feed, while a solitary water buffalo cools off in the mud, tossing its head periodically to drive away clouds of tsetse flies. Underneath a cluster of sausage trees, a troop of olive baboons clean their fur and squabble over fallen fruit. Soon, the wet season rains will come, dispersing wildlife across the sub-Saharan landscape, but today, it’s easy to see how vibrant waterholes such as this are key to the park’s astonishing biodiversity.
As the fierce light of day slowly begins to wane, a procession of Kordofan giraffes nervously approach the pan – eager to slake their thirst, yet clearly wary of predators lurking in the surrounding grass. Emboldened by the burgeoning size of the herd, they take turns to drink, heads down and front legs splayed as they take in litres of water.
‘Less than 20 years ago, you would never have seen giraffes drinking like this,’ says Zakaria Hassane, who has worked as a park ranger in Zakouma since the 1980s. ‘There were times when I thought we’d have nothing left to protect and the life of a ranger here was very dangerous. There certainly weren’t any overseas visitors around. But today, it feels like the park and its wildlife, and the people who live here, can look ahead to a better future.’
Park in peril
Between 2002 and 2010, poachers rampaged through Zakouma – a 3,000-square-kilometre swathe of grassland, savannah and open woodland situated south of the Sahara Desert and north of Central Africa’s lush rainforest belt – slaughtering 4,000 elephants. The major threat came from heavily armed horsemen from Sudan known as Janjaweed, who would regularly cross the border and sweep through the park, decimating wildlife and intimidating local communities. By 2010, only 454 heavily traumatised elephants remained, down from an estimated 22,000 in the 1970s. Other species, such as Kordofan giraffes and rhinos, were also gunned down.
‘At that point, Zakouma was in real trouble,’ says Naftali Honig, an American who, until last year, worked as general manager of the Greater Zakouma Ecosystem for African Parks, a South African-headquartered, non-profit organisation that manages 22 parks across Africa. ‘But nature is quick to recover and will bounce back if you give it the chance. From those dark days of destruction, Zakouma has grown to become a sanctuary for Central and West African wildlife, with Kordofan giraffes the poster boys for the park’s resurgence.’
Expert management
Since 2010, the Kordofan giraffe has benefitted from the expert management of African Parks, which signed a long-term agreement to restore and manage Zakouma in June that year. Security was ramped up, poaching was rapidly brought under control, and mutually beneficial relations developed with local communities. Today, wildlife in the park, including its Kordofan giraffes, is generally thriving.
‘Zakouma’s giraffes suffered from poaching in the early 2000s, just like the park’s other large species,’ says Chiara Fraticelli, who carried out research in Zakouma until June 2023. ‘But since 2010, the population has been growing – the last census in the park, in 2021, put the population at around 1,500 individuals. When you consider the entire Kordofan giraffe population now totals less than 2,500 animals, you can see why Zakouma is viewed as the animal’s last stronghold.’
An African savannah without giraffes is like a bucolic English landscape without sheep or cows. Yet as one of Africa’s most emblematic wildlife species – and the world’s tallest mammal – the giraffe is in danger of disappearing forever, with a combination of habitat loss and illegal poaching, as well as other threats, driving this gentle giant to the edge of extinction.
Since the 1980s, the giraffe population in Africa has decreased by about a quarter, with the UK-based Giraffe Conservation Foundation – the only NGO in the world that concentrates solely on the conservation and management of giraffes in the wild throughout Africa – estimating numbers to have fallen from 155,000 to 117,000. While campaigns to save populations of rhinos, gorillas and African elephants have captured the headlines, the alarming decline of giraffe populations has largely slipped under the radar. In 2018–19, the parlous condition of the species was further underlined when most populations of IUCN-recognised giraffe subspecies were assessed as critically endangered.
Taxonomic complexity
While the downward trend in giraffe numbers is concerning, it also highlights a curious aspect of giraffe taxonomy – just how many different types of giraffe are there? The IUCN has long recognised one species (Giraffa camelopardalis) and nine subspecies. More recently, however, the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, in collaboration with the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, carried out the first-ever comprehensive DNA sampling and analysis of all major giraffe populations. This revealed four distinct species of giraffe: the Masai, southern, northern and reticulated giraffe, and seven subspecies.
The Kordofan giraffe (G. c. antiquorum), a subspecies of the northern or three-horned giraffe, is smaller than other giraffes, with randomly distributed spots on the inside of its legs and pale patches, and no markings on its lower legs. Adult males can reach up to 4.7 metres (around 15.5 feet) in height, while females are slightly shorter.
‘Like all giraffe subspecies, Kordofan giraffes are herbivores,’ explains Fraticelli. ‘They like to feed on acacia, mimosa and wild apricot trees, stripping the leaves from branches with their long prehensile tongues. These are gregarious animals that tend to vary their social preferences depending on habitat, disturbance levels and foraging behaviour. In Zakouma, they typically live in dynamic herds of between ten and 20 individuals, although you can sometimes see bigger groups of up to 50. It’s a truly impressive sight.’
Wide-ranging threats
Today, giraffes across Africa face a wide range of threats. Habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation – together with human population growth, poaching, disease, civil unrest and military action – are negatively impacting many populations. Hunters kill giraffes not only for their meat, but also for their pelts, bones, hair, and tails, which are highly valued by some cultures. Direct human–giraffe conflict is rare, but can arise as a result of crop loss and damage, while there is a risk of disease transmission from livestock. The fragmentation and loss of giraffe habitat caused by human encroachment and infrastructure development often leads to the isolation of giraffe populations, limiting the flow and exchange of genetic diversity.
Sadly for the Kordofan giraffe, its range overlaps with some of the most politically unsettled and economically disadvantaged parts of Africa: southern Chad, the Central African Republic, northern Cameroon and northern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Giraffe conservation is difficult at the best of times, but delivering effective protection in such unstable and disadvantaged areas is an even tougher challenge.
‘In line with the declining trend in giraffe numbers across Africa, these wide-ranging threats mean the entire Kordofan giraffe population has decreased by more than 80 per cent over the last 35 years,’ says Fraticelli. ‘In many African national parks, such as Bénoué National Park in Cameroon, they are in danger of disappearing completely.’
‘To protect giraffes effectively in the wild, we need to learn more about them and their movements,’ adds Stephanie Fennessy, executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. ‘Giraffes have been largely under-studied in the past, and it is only in recent years that we are learning more about these iconic animals across their African range.’
Community outreach
For most African protected areas to operate successfully, they need to develop good relations with the people living in and around them. The local population surrounding Zakouma may be low in density, but villagers are heavily dependent on natural resources for their subsistence. During the dry season, this population is swelled by nomadic herders, who settle around the park to water their cattle, sheep and camels.
Having managed national parks across Africa since 2003, African Parks is well aware that a balance needs to be struck between the needs of humans and the protection of Zakouma’s recovering wildlife. The Greater Zakouma ecosystem is now the largest employer in the region, supporting small businesses ranging from honey harvesting to shea butter production. The low-volume, high-value tourism that African Parks encourages also puts money into the local economy, while most of the park’s well-equipped and well-trained rangers come from the surrounding area.
Since 2013, 17 schools have been built and supported, offering thousands of children a stable education for the first time in their lives. Villages around Zakouma have also been provided with radios so they can act as an early-warning system for rangers when poachers are in the area – which also helps inhabitants to feel more secure – while the distribution of metal cooking stoves has helped to reduce illegal wood harvesting.
Towards enhanced protection
Five years ago, the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, in collaboration with the Kordofan Giraffe Project and African Parks, launched Chad’s first-ever giraffe GPS satellite tagging programme. The aim of the programme, which has seen 17 female giraffes collared, is to better understand the habitat that giraffes use, their movements inside and outside Zakouma, and the potential threats the animals face. Before the programme began, it was unclear whether giraffes were staying inside park boundaries throughout the year as their range expanded and contracted according to the region’s wet and dry seasonal cycle.
‘It was previously assumed that Zakouma’s Kordofan giraffes kept within the park, but from our findings we now know that they regularly move beyond the park boundaries, often spending months at a time outside in communal areas,’ says Fennessy. ‘This information is helping to inform management decisions and forge partnerships with local communities. Ultimately, it will help to enhance protection of this critically endangered subspecies.’
Giraffes are facing a silent extinction crisis across Africa. But there’s still hope that the widespread decline of populations can be reversed if people are made aware of and address the threats. Efforts to translocate animals into new areas without existing giraffe populations – for example, into reserves within Niger and Uganda – have boosted numbers locally. The excellent example of Zakouma National Park shows that a combination of comprehensive law enforcement, coupled with effective community engagement and a better understanding of giraffe behaviour, can lead to population growth and landscapes where these iconic animals and people live and thrive alongside one another.
