Wildlife to see in Senegal in February
10 spectacles at their peak in Senegal in February, and 1 more still going on. Wild animals only: no zoos, no wildlife parks, no hunting. Open Senegal in February in the interactive calendar for listening times on the day you pick.
At their peak in February
Great white pelican colony at DjoudjA wall of pelican grunts and chick begging from a few thousand pairs packed onto low islets a boat-length away, wings slapping water as flotillas fish in formation, and darters and cormorants in the tamarisks.
Palearctic ducks and waders wintering at DjoudjGarganey and pintail flocks in the hundreds of thousands lifting off the Grand Lac in continuous waves, whistling ducks and spur-winged geese over the pirogue, flamingo chorus in the shallows and the wing-roar of a pelican colony taking off — one of the loudest waterbird soundscapes on the whole flyway.
Dindéfélo — savanna chimpanzees pant-hooting under the Fouta Djallon escarpmentThe northern-most chimpanzee chorus in Africa: pant-hoots climbing to screams from the gallery forest under the escarpment, buttress drumming echoing off the cliff, baboons barking in reply, then the waterfall and a hornbill dawn. The village wakes with cockerels, mortars and the mosque — walk 20 minutes out and it is gone.
Kousmar — the world's largest lesser kestrel and scissor-tailed kite roostTens of thousands of small falcons and kites settling into a few hectares of acacias with a continuous chittering and the rush of wings, then a night of restless calling; the Saloum's mangroves and the town's calls to prayer behind.
Niokolo-Koba — hippos, lions and the Gambia river in the dry seasonHippo pods bellowing on the Gambia river below the Simenti terrace, lions roaring across the dry savanna, hyenas, and at dawn the booming of ground hornbills and the calls of spur-winged geese and Egyptian plovers on the sandbars.
Saloum Delta — tern roosts, mangrove herons and wintering wadersThousands of terns and waders on the sandbars of the Saloum mouth, the click and hiss of mangrove at low tide (mudskippers, fiddler crabs, snapping shrimp with a hydrophone), goliath heron's bark, and pied kingfishers everywhere.
Atlantic humpback dolphins of the Saloum delta — the species' last strongholdThrough a hydrophone: whistles and click-trains of a species almost never recorded (the surveys deploy SoundTraps and F-PODs to build its first sound library). Above water: blows, the slap of a fluke, pied kingfishers, and the mangrove's own chorus of herons and fiddler crabs at low water.
Red-billed tropicbird colony, Îles de la MadeleineTropicbirds' rasping, ratcheting display screams as pairs circle the basalt cliffs of Sarpan island a few metres overhead, surf in the sea caves, and Dakar's hum across 4 km of water.
Somone lagoon — pelicans, flamingos and the sandbank roost on the Petite CôtePelican wings and bill-clapping as the flock lands, tern and gull roost clamour, flamingo honks, spoonbills and herons in the mangrove, osprey whistles — small-scale next to the Saloum but the closest proper lagoon roost to the Saly resorts, and quiet at dawn before the jet-skis.
Technopole — Dakar's urban wetland roostWader and stilt calls over rain-fed lakes ringed by the Pikine suburbs; more a sighting spectacle, but the heron roost at dusk is loud.
Also going on in February
Tern and gull colonies of the Langue de BarbarieA packed royal and Caspian tern colony screaming on a sand islet in the Senegal river mouth, gull colonies underneath, and the Atlantic surf on the spit a few hundred metres away.