Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 28
ZO OLO GY
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
Then add scales.
That’s how Mercia Angela describes the pangolins she cares for at the Gorongosa National
Park in Mozambique, where she runs the country’s
only rescue center for the world’s most frequently illegally
trafficked mammal. “They sleep a lot,” she says.
Pangolins are nocturnal by nature and elusive in the
wild, preferring to burrow in savannas and floodplains, or
scrabble up trees in wooded areas where they can remain out
of sight. Yet, despite their demure ways, they are the focus of
a harrowing drama, their species poached to near extinction
by a massive and illegal worldwide trade.
That’s where Angela’s rehab center—and the lush
sprawl of Gorongosa as a whole—come in. It’s been a little
more than three decades since the ravages of Mozambique’s
16-year civil war, by which time Gorongosa’s population of
large mammals had shrunk by 95 percent. Antelope had been
slaughtered to feed troops and hundreds of elephants had
been killed, their tusks traded for guns. Pangolins didn’t fare
any better. For centuries, their meat has been prized as a delicacy in Southeast Asia, and their scales valued in traditional
medicinal practices in China. In the West, pangolins barely
had a public profile until they were briefly but incorrectly
implicated as a possible origin of the COVID-19 virus. Now,
because populations in Southeast Asia have been decimated,
the pangolins native to sub-Saharan Africa are being caught
in poachers’ snares.
After 30 years of restoration, Gorongosa has become
a leading African conservation project, the pangolin rescue
one of its central missions. Encompassing 1,500 square miles
at the southern end of the Rift Valley, the park may host as
many as 75,000 different species of flora and fauna. Among
them, the African ground pangolin plies its lonely nighttime
trade, its excavations making it a sort of gardener providing
invaluable rejuvenation of the soil.
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