Wildlife to see in Gabon in December
3 spectacles at their peak in Gabon in December, and 1 more still going on. Wild animals only: no zoos, no wildlife parks, no hunting. Open Gabon in December in the interactive calendar for listening times on the day you pick.
At their peak in December
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.
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.
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.
Also going on in December
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.