Wildlife spectacles in Gabon
6 spectacles through the year, ordered by when they peak. Open Gabon in the interactive calendar for the map and listening times.
Langoué Bai: elephants, gorillas and red river hogs at the Ivindo clearingA bai at night is the best elephant listening in Central Africa: rumbles, trumpets, splashing and the squabbling of family groups at the mineral pools, with tree hyrax, frogs and owls in the forest ring. By day, red river hog groups of fifty, gorilla chest-beats and 'hoo' series from the edge, and the whistles of grey parrots in hundreds.
Lopé: the mandrill super-groups of the dry seasonA horde of several hundred mandrills on the move is one of the loudest things in an African forest: a rolling wave of grunts, two-phase 'crowing' from the males, screams, branches breaking and the drumming of hundreds of feet in the leaf litter, approaching for minutes before anything is seen and fading for minutes after. Around it, the savanna–forest dawn: hornbills, greenbuls, elephants rumbling at the forest edge.
Humpback whales off Loango — the Gulf of Guinea breeding groundBlows and tail-slaps carry over a flat sea; a hydrophone over the side of a drifting boat in August picks up singing males — the real sound event is underwater. On shore, surf and the roar of the Atlantic swell dominate; the whales are a visual spectacle from the beach.
Loango: forest elephants, buffalo and hippos on the ocean beachSurf behind everything. Elephants are near-silent on sand, but the rumbles and the crack of branches at the forest edge carry at dawn; hippo grunts from the lagoons at dusk; red river hog groups snuffling through the leaf litter; the chatter of river-martin flocks over the water in August–October and chimpanzee pant-hoots from the forest behind Akaka in the wet season.
Akanda and the Mondah bay flats: Gabon's wader wintering ground on Libreville's doorstepThe massed calls of stints and sandpipers lifting off the flats as the tide comes in, whimbrel and godwit over the mangroves, tern colonies shrieking on the sandbank; behind it the drip and click of the mangrove at low water and mangabeys crashing in the Rhizophora.
Leatherback nesting from Pongara to Mayumba — Gabon's turtle coastA leatherback digging is a slow, heavy scrape and the hiss of thrown sand, with deep sighing breaths — audible from 20 m on a still night between sets of surf. Otherwise the night is surf, the odd nightjar and, at Pongara, hippos and elephants in the forest behind the beach.