Wildlife to see in Guinea in December
5 spectacles at their peak in Guinea in December, and 1 more still going on. Wild animals only: no zoos, no wildlife parks, no hunting. Open Guinea in December in the interactive calendar for listening times on the day you pick.
At their peak in December
Mount Nimba — chimpanzees of Bossou and the Nimba highlandsStone-on-stone nut cracking and pant-hoots from the Bossou hills — the most-studied wild chimpanzees in West Africa — and above them the grassland-and-cloud-forest soundscape of Nimba: montane birds, wind in the ridge grass, and the tiny viviparous toad's calls in the wet season.
Ziama massif — forest elephants and the Guinean rainforest dawnA full Upper Guinea rainforest dawn — casqued hornbills' wingbeats and whooping, Diana monkeys, chimps, the great blue turaco — and at night the crash and rumble of forest elephants in one of their last Guinean refuges.
Île Alcatraz — the only brown booby colony between Cabo Verde and São ToméA tropical booby rock: the braying and whistling of thousands of brown boobies, the grating roar of a royal tern colony, wings everywhere, guano and fish — a sound that exists nowhere else on the West African mainland coast. Only the sea and your own outboard compete.
Fouta Djallon — savanna chimpanzees and the Bafing highlandsChimp calls echoing off sandstone canyon walls in a savanna-woodland mosaic, baboon troops on the cliffs, hippos on the Bafing, and canyons full of waterfall noise after the rains — with the Fulani villages' cattle and calls to prayer.
Tristão islands and the Rio Nunez estuary — waders, terns and mangroveWader and tern roosts on mangrove-fringed sandbanks at the southern end of the Bijagós system, with the mangrove's own crackle and the villages' fishing pirogues.
Also going on in December
Haut Niger National Park — the Mafou savanna and the upper NigerHippos on the upper Niger, ground hornbills' bass at dawn, chimps in the gallery forests of the Mafou core, and the dry savanna at night with hyenas and nightjars — a Sahelian-Guinean mix with almost nobody there.