Episode 15: Rachel Ashegbofe Ikemeh, Nigeria

Charles and Jon talk with Rachel Ashegbofe Ikemeh, founder of the SW/Niger Delta Conservation Project. Rachel, a Nigerian conservationist and visionary, has built a team of almost 100 people working at the grassroots community level to save the wildlife of the Niger Delta. The delta, densely populated and home to oil and gas reserves, is one of the most degraded environments on the planet. It contains over half of the swamp forest in West and Central Africa and is the world's largest mangrove forest. But 95% of that forest has been lost in the past 15 years.Rachel describes her career and how she stumbled into conservation work despite the many obstacles she faced from a society where young women are expected to get married and have children and definitely not become biologists!She talks about some of the delta's many special mammals including critically endangered primates like the the Niger Delta Red Colobus that Rachel's team is bringing back from the brink of extinction with the help of local communities.And Rachel talks about some of the very many dangers she has faced working in this difficult area. She has run the gauntlet of everything from death threats to drowning and also had a very close encounter with an angry Elephant.For more information visit www.mammalwatching.com/podcastNotes: You can follow Rachel's team on Instagram here. And here is a short video, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, celebrating Rachel as a winner of the 2020 Whitley Awards for her work with Chimpanzees. This is the opinion piece Rachel wrote on the Western media's role in the decline of West Africa's Wildlife.Jon's Texas report is here.Cover art: Rachel at work. Dr Charles Foley is a mammalwatcher and biologist who, together with his wife Lara, spent 30 years studying elephants in Tanzania. They now run the Tanzania Conservation Research Program at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.Jon Hall set up mammalwatching.com in 2005. Genetically Welsh, spiritually Australian, currently in New York City. He has looked for mammals in over 110 countries.