Gorongosa National Park is a park of floodplain, woodland and lake at the southern end of the Rift Valley in Sofala province, in central Mozambique, whose herds were shot out in the civil war of 1977 to 1992 and have been rebuilt since 2004 into one of the great recoveries of African conservation, where the poaching left about half the adult female elephants born without tusks. The park was the finest in southern Africa in the 1960s, and the war, fought around it, killed roughly nine of every ten large animals for meat and ivory; the cows born tuskless were the ones the poachers left alone, so they passed the trait on, and the science of that is studied here along with the return of the lions, the wild dogs and the leopards brought back in the last twenty years. The floodplain around Lake Urema is the park's heart, where waterbuck are so densely packed that the survey teams photograph the herds and count off the pictures, and as the lake drains back in the dry season the waterbuck, reedbuck and buffalo pack onto the drying grass in their tens of thousands, with the lion prides dozing in the open and the bulk of Mount Gorongosa behind them.
The Urema wetland is of global importance for birds, and in November the migrants arrive as the residents come into breeding colour, so that guides working the floodplain edges log more than 150 species in a day, egrets, storks and grey crowned cranes in silhouette at dusk. A separate trek leaves the savanna heat and climbs Mount Gorongosa into cool boulder-strewn grassland and dripping montane forest, where the green-headed oriole lives above 700 metres and on no other mountain in the country, and where farmers now grow arabica coffee in the shade of hardwood saplings they plant themselves, so every bush is an argument for a tree. Walks with a ranger thread the fever-tree woodland on sandy tracks. Gorongosa is a park a war emptied, and the elephants that came back carry the proof of it.