A drill monkey in an electric enclosure at the ranch. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS
By Promise Eze
BOKI, Nigeria, Oct 2 2025 – For the past 23 years, Gabriel Oshie has started his mornings at Drill Ranch in the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, Boki, Cross River state, southern Nigeria.
At sunrise, he walks through an electric enclosure at the ranch, giving bananas and other fruits to the over 200 endangered drill monkeys he watches over.
Drill monkeys are among the world’s rarest primates, known for their brightly coloured faces and short tails. They live in large groups led by a dominant male and are found only in parts of Nigeria, southwestern Cameroon and Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea.
However, their numbers have fallen sharply due to deforestation, hunting and the illegal wildlife trade. The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates fewer than 4,000 remain in the wild.
“Wildlife is the beauty of nature,” Oshie said, explaining what motivated him to work at the ranch. “When you see the drill monkeys, the forests, and other animals, you can’t help but appreciate their beauty. But it’s sad that people are destroying wildlife despite its importance.”
Gabriel Oshie has been working at the ranch for the past 23 years. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS
Wildlife Crime
Wildlife crime is the fourth most profitable illegal trade globally, worth billions of dollars each year. Nigeria has become a key hub, with porous borders and weak enforcement enabling traffickers to move ivory, pangolin scales and other endangered species.
Authorities have tried to curb the trade by shutting bushmeat markets and seizing smuggled wildlife. In July, officials announced the country’s largest wildlife-trafficking bust, intercepting more than 1,600 birds bound for Kuwait at Lagos International Airport.
But experts warn these efforts could fail if weak conservation laws, poor enforcement, limited public awareness and the lack of arrests or convictions persist.
“The state of biodiversity in Nigeria is in serious crisis,” said Rita Uwaka, Interim Administrator for Environmental Rights Action. “Much of our forested landscape has been depleted due to industrial plantations expansion, leading to significant loss of plant and animal species with devastating impacts on people and climate. We are also seeing concession agreements awarded to large-scale agro-commodities companies contributing to increased biodiversity loss. They arrive with promises of development, but vast forested areas, family farms, and ancestral lands are handed over to them amidst social, environmental, and gender impacts. In the process, they cut down forests that should serve as vital hubs for ecological conservation.
“The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss in Nigeria are in the agro-commodity sector, where large tracts of forest and wildlife sanctuaries are allocated to corporations at the expense of local communities, especially women and vulnerable groups who suffer differentiated impacts when forests and biodiversity are destroyed,” she added.
Preserving the drills
Two American conservationists, Liza Gadsby and Peter Jenkins, founded Drill Ranch in 1991 through their non-profit group Pandrillus. Now home to over 600 drills, it is the world’s most successful breeding project for the species.
En route to Botswana with only a tourist visa, Gadsby and Jenkins arrived in Nigeria where they learned of a gorilla conservation project in Boki. There, they discovered not only gorillas but also drill monkeys, thought before the 1980s to be nearly extinct outside Cameroon.
“Less was known about drills at the time, and they were more endangered than gorillas across Africa. Of course, the local people knew they were there all along, but the international community had only recently rediscovered them. So, we became quite interested in them,” Gadsby explained to IPS.
For over three years, their tourist journey took a different turn as they travelled across southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon, gathering information and persuading locals to surrender captive drills.
They established a sanctuary in Calabar, the capital of Cross River state, later expanding it into a natural habitat in Boki. They worked closely with 18 Boki communities, each contributing rangers who were often former hunters, to patrol the forests and deter poaching. Their efforts paid off, with locals surrendering as many as 90 drills to the project.
Today, the ranch houses both captive-bred and wild-born drills, each with a name and tattoo number. Alongside the drills, it cares for 27 chimpanzees, a soft-shell turtle and 29 African grey parrots seized from traffickers in 2021. In 2024, 25 parrots were released back into the wild.
The presence of Pandrillus in Boki, one of Nigeria’s largest green canopies, helped drive conservation gains in the area. In 2000, after a decade of lobbying, part of the forest reserve, where the ranch is located, was declared a wildlife Sanctuary by the government.
“We had been lobbying for over ten years, proposing that a portion of the forest reserve be upgraded to wildlife sanctuary status,” Gadsby said.
Bleak Future?
Rehabilitating drills into the wild is the main goal of the project, but rapid deforestation in Boki and Cross River is making this increasingly difficult, said ranch manager Zach Schwenneker.
With the thriving cocoa trade in the region, many people turn to farming for a living, often cutting down forests, including protected areas, for cultivation and exposing drills and other animals in the ranch to poachers.
Government support is also dwindling. Pandrillus once received monthly subventions to care for the animals, but the suspension of this funding has hindered conservation efforts. Today, the ranch relies largely on international aid and individual donations.
Uwaka told IPS that Nigeria’s National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan would have effectively addressed these issues, but she argues that “The problem lies in enforcement. While the laws look impressive on paper, they are often ineffective in practice due to weak monitoring systems. Even where such systems exist, they are insufficient to ensure compliance. Policies should be put in place not to encourage poaching, and there should be strong regulatory frameworks to curb deforestation.”
For Oshie at the ranch, the project can only succeed if people value wildlife and biodiversity and no longer feel the need to hunt drills.
“But I’m here because I want to protect nature. If we are not here, logging activities could take over, destroying the trees and harming the animals,” he said.
IPS UN Bureau Report
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