W National Park takes its name from a letter drawn by a river: the Niger doubles back on itself in two tight meanders that trace a W where Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso meet. Niger made the savanna on its bank a national park in 1954, and UNESCO inscribed it in 1996; in 2017 the listing grew to take in the adjoining parks of Benin and Burkina Faso. Together they form the W-Arly-Pendjari complex, 1.7 million hectares of grassland, wooded savanna and gallery forest — the largest intact block of Sudano-Sahelian savanna left in West Africa. The reason for all that protection is what still lives inside it. Roughly 8,900 elephants roam the complex, about 85 percent of the savanna elephants left in West Africa, along with nine in ten of the region's remaining lions — a subspecies down to fewer than 250 mature individuals. Cheetah, leopard and even the African manatee hang on here.
The park runs on water. Rains from June to September swell the Mekrou and the Tapoa, drown the tracks and cut the park off; then the land dries, the pools shrink, and by February the animals are pressed against the last water. That is when the birds come: more than 20,000 waterbirds gather along these rivers between February and May, on a flyway that carries ducks, storks and herons down from Europe and Asia. Visitors once drove out at dawn from the lodge at La Tapoa, past crocodiles hauled onto the mud, into dust that turns gold in the late light. Almost nobody does now: jihadist groups began basing themselves in the park around 2020, the soldiers sent to hold the Tapoa camp withdrew that December after two forestry guards were killed, and attacks have continued across the complex ever since. The animals are still there. The visitors are not.