Abuko was never planned as a nature reserve. In 1916 the colonial administration fenced off the Lamin Stream to protect a water collection point, and the fence did the rest: it kept out axes, fires and grazing cattle, and the forest along the stream thickened for fifty years while the land around it was cleared. In 1967 the wildlife officer Eddie Brewer saw what had grown up behind the wire and pressed the government to keep it; The Gambia declared Abuko its first protected area the following year. Little more than a square kilometre, it holds what most of the country has lost — a closed-canopy gallery forest over permanent water, with silk-cotton and mahogany trees far taller than anything in the fields outside. That water explains the numbers. More than 270 bird species have been recorded here, four primates live in the trees, including the endangered Temminck's red colobus, and the pools hold both Nile crocodiles and their rare, blunt-snouted forest cousin, the dwarf crocodile.
Two photo hides look down on those pools, and the platform view is why people come: bushbuck stepping out of the undergrowth to drink, monkeys along the far bank, crocodiles hauled out in the sun, often all in one frame. On the trail the canopy closes overhead and you hear animals before you see them — branches crashing as a colobus troop moves, doves dropping to the mud to drink. From February to May the leaves thin and the pools shrink, and everything in the reserve is pulled towards the water. Near the entrance, pens hold rescued animals; it was here, in the early 1970s, that Brewer's daughter Stella raised the orphaned chimpanzees that grew into the rehabilitation project still running far upriver. Today the forest is an island of another kind, hemmed in by the spreading suburbs of the coast.