00:01This ranger is taking care of this little elephant calf at this Nigeria's Okomu National Park.
00:06As dawn break over the park, an exhausted wildlife caretaker prepares milk formula for Abaibo, a man's all orphan forest
00:15elephant.
00:17So we are supposed to be like a mother to him.
00:20So whatever the mother will be doing with him in the wild, we also try to do it with him
00:25by feeding him
00:27and also try to play with him also and try and groom him.
00:33So basically it's just like we are like the mother to him.
00:39These orphan forest elephants were rescued after wandering out of rainforest alone.
00:47Forest elephants, smaller and more elusive than their savannah cousins, are endangered
00:52and their population has collapsed in recent decades largely because of habitat loss and poaching.
01:00Very importantly, Okomu is habitat to the critically endangered African forest elephants.
01:07And within Nigeria, it holds an estimated population of about 40 elephants.
01:13And that is huge for the southwestern part of Nigeria to have such elephants within a small landscape like this.
01:21Because in Nigeria as a whole, we have an estimated population of about 200 elephants.
01:27So on a small ecosystem like this, housing 40 is a huge number and it needs to be protected at
01:35all costs.
01:35The International Union for Conservation of Nature, least forest elephant, is critically endangered.
01:41With conservation, it's estimating only around 200 remaining in the country.
01:45Roughly 40 are believed to live in and around Okomu, one of Nigeria's last remaining rainforest ecosystems.
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