W National Park is a savanna of gallery forest, tall grass and laterite plateaus in the Tillabéri region of southwestern Niger, named for the double bend the Niger river makes where Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso meet, and it is the Nigerien third of a park shared by the three countries, the largest intact grassland in West Africa and the region's stronghold of elephants, created in 1954, older than the republic it sits in. The park's lions are not the lions of the Serengeti but a northern lineage whose closest living relatives are the last Asiatic lions of India, and its elephants, buffalo and antelope are the herds that West Africa has lost almost everywhere else; the dry season is the time, since by March the Mekrou river is a ribbon of shallow water across a wide bed of sand hemmed by gallery forest and baobabs, and everything comes to it, watched through the afternoon from the bank, while where the Mekrou empties into the Niger the ground turns to wetland broken by rocky hills, the one water that never fails, with hippos and crocodiles. Away from the water the savanna is head-high grass, and every sighting in it is earned slowly from the vehicle.
The park holds the southern edge of Niger's tiger-bush plateaus, where on hard laterite the vegetation grows in dark bands that follow the contour, separated by strips of bare crust, a pattern seen from the air like a striped hide. The African manatee has pushed a thousand kilometres up the Niger from the sea and grazes the weed in the river's quiet backwaters, a marine mammal living in the dry heart of West Africa, and as the dry season squeezes the park to its last pools more than 20,000 waterbirds off the flyway from Europe crowd the rivers. The camp at Tapoa on the river is the base, three hours from Niamey, and the security of the border region decides the season. W is a park named for a river's handwriting, and the lions in it are cousins of India's.