A whistle blows. The vehicle stops, and the driver is politely asked to turn off the engine and get out.
A team from Gabon’s anti-poaching brigade then searches the vehicle from top to bottom, looking in every cranny for guns or game.
Nothing is found, and the driver is allowed to move on.
Photo: AFP
The unit’s task is to help guard Gabon’s rich biodiversity.
Forests cover 88 percent of the surface of this small central African nation, providing a haven — and a tourism magnet — for species ranging from tropical hardwoods and plants to panthers, elephants and chimpanzees.
The team was on patrol close to the village of Lastourville, 500km southeast of the capital, Libreville.
Photo: AFP
The area has been badly hit by poaching, and tracks dug into the forest floor by logging vehicles are also used by illegal hunters to enter and shoot game.
“There’s no standard profile of a poacher. Everyone poaches — from the villager who is looking for something to eat to some big guy from the city who has an international network,” brigade commander Jerry Ibala Mayombo said.
The unarmed unit sees its role as “educating, awareness-building and, as a last resort, punishing,” Ibala Mayombo said.
The heaviest sentences are for ivory smuggling, which can carry a 10-year jail term.
The two-year-old service was created by a partnership between the Gabonese of Water, Forests, the Sea and Environment, a Belgian nongovernmental organization called Conservation Justice and a Swiss-Gabonese sustainable forestry firm, Precious Woods CEB.
“At the start, the overall feeling toward us was mistrust, but that’s not the case today, because we have got the message across to people about what we do,” Ibala Mayombo said.
“We sometimes face violent poachers who threaten us, sometimes with their guns,” he said.
The team can be given a police escort when necessary.
Last year, the unit seized 26 weapons and several dozen game items, and arrested eight people for ivory smuggling.
“There is a downward trend,” Ibala Mayombo said.
In the village of Bouma, about 30 local people attended a meeting to promote awareness about hunting restrictions — which species could be hunted, on what dates could they be hunted, which areas banned hunting, how was a permit obtained, and so on.
The mood was tense.
“What can we do when animals invade our fields?” a person asked.
“How can someone tell the difference between a protected species and a [non-protected] one when they’re hunting at night?” another person asked.
“I do understand that we have to protect wildlife,” said Leon Ndjanganoye, a man in his 50s.
“But here, in the village, what do we do to live? We hunt,” Ndjanganoye said. “The laws are simply a vexation.”
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