During 6 months and a half, I covered an area of 900 squared km in the SW of the Park. I found chimpanzee signs in most of the area, at least 5 different groups still thrieving in good health. Poaching had affected them, but they weren't decimated yet. The local mixture of traditional animist and muslim beliefs had led poachers to target many other species better than chimps, allowing these incredible animals to survive.
Elephants were also still there. Maybe not the great herds that roamed the savanna in the last century, but good family groups of forest elephants dwelled in the gallery forest. How all these great animals had remained undetected for most of the last decade?
They had learned to become invisible.
I used for this preliminary phase of the Comoé Chimpanzee Conservation Project a simple light equipment that allowed me to work fast and cover as much area as possible. As part of the equipment, I used 20 camera-traps that I placed in the most promising hot spots of the chimpanzee territories. Beside the many chimps that I will introduce to you in next posts, we got many other animals, proving that, despite all the poaching, the Comoé National Park was still full of an incredible diversity of big vertebrates.
You can get a first glimpse in this video:
ANIMALS OF COMOÉ NATIONAL PARK

In October 2014, I returned to Comoé National Park, I wanted to look for what I thought would be the last surviving chimps so I started a short project supported by Prof. Linsenmair and Wuerzburg University.. More than a decade of Civil War, the so called "Crisis" between 2002 and 2011 had left the park largely unprotected and allowed massive poaching and bushmeat trade, leading to the functional extinction of lions and drastic reduction in most big mammals populations.
The chimpanzee population of the 90s was estimated to have declined by 90 % already in 2007, but after that, all biomonitoring censuses, in 2010, 2012 and 2014 had failed to detect a single sign of chimpanzees or elephants. Consultants stated in their report in 2014 that both elephants and chimpanzees were probably almost extinct in Comoé National Park because they couldn't see them from a plane. They were wrong.

In May 2013, I visited Comoé National Park for the first time in a fast survey promoted by Max Planck Institute. I was impressed by this incredibly vast wilderness. Most of Ivory Coast former natural spaces have already been destroyed to plant industrial crops for exportation, such as oil palm, cocoa, rubber tree or cashew nut and therefore I was surprised by the long time it took us to surround the park to arrive to its Southern entrance. For hours, I drove the old land-cruiser through the bumpy dusty road that marks the park limit, seeing nothing else than kilometers of savanna and dry forests in the park side, and frequently in the outer side too.
When we finally got to the entrance and headed to the German research station Comoé, following an even narrower and bumpier dirt road, sun was already setting and colors got incredibly hot. Kobs started appearing along the road and patas monkeys jumped over it. I started falling in love with this place.