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.