Ogun Forest Reserve where poachers have turned rangers

forest, where they take turns staying each week and organise patrols. The camp has a small solar power system and a round room where the rangers can rest amid the sounds of birds and insects chirping and wind blowing through the trees. Outside, the rangers plan their work at a large wooden table beneath a perforated zinc roof. 

The roughly hour-long journey from their administrative office to the camp is difficult, with a road that is impassable for vehicles and even motorcycles when it rains. But once there, ecologist Babajide Agboola, who mentors the rangers and helps document new species, declared, “This is peace.”

Despite the physically taxing work, Adebayo of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation said the rangers have a better life than as poachers, where they could spend 10 days hunting with no guarantee of success. “Now, they have a salary and other benefits, in addition to doing something good for the environment and humanity, and they can put food on the table more comfortably,” Adebayo said. 

The rangers have installed motiondetecting cameras on trees in the most protected part of the forest to capture footage of animals and poachers. In a 24-second video recorded in May, one elephant picks up food with its trunk near a tree at night. Other images from 2021 and 2023 also show elephants. Poaching has not been eradicated in the forest, but rangers said they have made significant progress.

 They say the main challenges are now illegal settlements of cocoa farmers and loggers that are growing in the conservation areas, where it is not permitted. “We want the government to support our conservation effort to preserve what remains of the forest,” said another poacher-turned-ranger, Johnson Adejayin. “We see people we arrested and handed over to the government return to the forest to continue illegal logging and farming. 

They’d just move to another part.” One official from the government’s forestry department said they were not authorized to comment and another did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment. Rangers implore communities in the forest, particularly farmers, to avoid clearing land and plant new trees.

 However, they called the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations critical to success. “We are losing Omo Forest at a very alarming rate,” said Agboola, the ecologist, who has been visiting for eight years. “When the forest is destroyed, biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost. When you cut down trees, you cut down a climate change mitigation solution, which fuels carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.”