01 Ninety-five thousand
The figure recent studies work with is around 95,000 animals in Gabon. Set beside the country's area, it becomes even more striking: Gabon holds barely twelve per cent of the Congo basin's rainforest and yet concentrates close to sixty per cent of all Africa's forest elephants.
And what turns the fact into travel information, rather than an encyclopedia curiosity, is the distance. Pongara National Park occupies the estuary shore directly opposite Libreville. From the seafront of a capital of almost nine hundred thousand people you look across and what is there is forest elephant habitat.
02 A country that is forest
The explanation for why they are here and not elsewhere is simple: here there is still forest. Eighty-eight per cent of Gabon's surface is under jungle, the second highest proportion in the world after Suriname, and much of that jungle has never been converted into anything else.
Gabon holds twelve per cent of the Congo basin's rainforest and almost sixty per cent of its forest elephants. What is scarce is not the animal: it is intact forest.
That is the important nuance and the one that changes how you read the country. Gabon is not exceptional because it has more elephants than its share, but because it has more standing forest than its share. The elephants are the consequence, not the cause, and that is why the figure says so much about the territory.
03 Thirteen parks in a single year
In 2002 Gabon announced the creation of thirteen national parks at once: three million hectares, eleven per cent of the country's surface. It was not a gradual expansion of an existing network, it was the creation of the whole network in a single move, in a country that until then had practically no protected areas at all.
For the traveller, the practical consequence is that eleven points in every hundred of Gabon's map are set aside, and that one of them begins on the shore opposite the capital. You do not need to cross the country to enter a national park: you need to cross an arm of the sea.
It is worth saying what they are not, too. These parks are not fitted-out reserves with signposted tracks and viewpoints. They are jungle, roadless and with very little infrastructure, and watching wildlife in closed forest is far harder than in savanna: the animals are there, but the forest hides them.
04 What to do with this
First, adjust your expectations of a sighting. A forest elephant is not seen the way a savanna one is. It is seen in passing, in a clearing, on a beach or on a track cut through the vegetation, almost always alone or in very small groups, and almost always for a few seconds. There is no guarantee at all, and anyone expecting herds will end up frustrated.
Second, choose the month. From June to August rainfall drops to between 5 and 18 millimetres a month, tracks are firm and outings can be planned. In October and November, at 419 and 464 millimetres, the whole forest gets difficult and many accesses stop being practicable.
And third, use the fact to read the country differently. Libreville presents itself as a coastal business capital, and it is one. But it sits on the edge of one of the last great blocks of intact rainforest on the planet, and that block supports most of the forest elephants left alive. Looking at the estuary knowing that is not the same as looking at it without knowing.
