Saving Nigeria’s drill monkeys: The wildlife haven that started by chance

By Promise Eze

Every day at 6 a.m., Emmanuel Okon, 42, makes his way from his small-sized room in the Afi Mountain Wildlife Ranch in rural Cross River to an electric fence enclosure that houses drill monkeys. 

His routine typically involves feeding the animals—at least 200 of them—with handfuls of groundnuts and pawpaw while keeping a close watch on their behaviour.

Considered among the world’s rarest primates, drill monkeys are native to west and central Africa, where they are found in remote parts of Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon, including Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea.  

Muscular and short-tailed, they have vibrantly coloured faces and genitals. They tend to live in large troops led by a dominant male. Their striking features notwithstanding, drills continue to face decline due to deforestation, commercial logging, and bushmeat hunting.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that the population of drills in the wild is fewer than 4000, listing them among its Red List of Threatened Species.

Protecting this endangered species from further decline is what inspires Okon, who has worked on the ranch for nearly two decades. As a child growing up in Cross River State, he recalls seeing large swathes of forest in his native community burnt down with wildlife frequently killed. In the early 2000s, he learned about the Drill Ranch’s conservation initiative and felt compelled to join.

“When I see people eating wild animals, I feel so bad,” Okon says. “Sometimes, hunters kill these animals and sell them to people. I don’t like seeing people eat wild animals.”

Wildlife Crime in Nigeria

With annual proceeds of between $5 and $20 billion, wildlife crime is ranked as the fourth most profitable illegal trade worldwide after drugs, human trafficking, and arms.

Despite domestic laws against killing endangered species and the illegal trade of protected animals, Nigeria has emerged as a major hub for wildlife trafficking. Pangolins, sea turtles, and monkeys are frequently eaten as food in many homes and restaurants.

In response, the Nigerian authorities have confiscated shipments of illegal wildlife products over the years. For example, in 2024, the Nigeria Customs Service seized 9,493 kg of pangolin scales in one of its biggest wildlife crime busts in recent years. Between 2009 and 2017, Nigeria seized nearly 30 metric tons of ivory.

This is in part due to the lax conservation laws protecting Nigeria’s forest reserves, which allow poachers to invade them and hunt for wildlife therein. As such, arrests and convictions have been rare. 

Also compounding this problem is a lack of awareness, according to Chinedu Mogbo, founder of the Green Fingers Wildlife Conservation Initiative. Many people hunt primates like drills without realising their importance to nature.

“If there was no demand for bushmeat, there would be no bushmeat market,” Mogbo argues. “Whenever authorities shut down the market, people find other ways to reopen it because the demand is still there. This is why conservation work is so important.”

A Chance Discovery

The rehabilitation of endangered drills is at the heart of Drill Ranch, a project of Pandrillus, a nonprofit, launched by American conservationists—Liza Gadsby and Peter Jenkins—in 1991. 

Nestled at the edge of the Afi Mountains in the Boki local government area  of Cross River State, the ranch is now the world’s most successful captive breeding program for endangered monkeys, focused on habitat protection, breeding, research, education, and advocacy.

The ranch traces its origin to 1988, when Gadsby and Jenkins arrived in Nigeria en route to Botswana with only a tourist visa. Following a chance meeting with another American in Ibadan, the duo soon learned about a proposed project by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation to protect gorillas that had been found in Boki, north of Cross River.

The Americans arrived in Boki for what would be the gorilla conservation project but were surprised to also find drill monkeys. Prior to the 1980s, the scientific community believed that drills were nearly extinct in much of Africa except for a few populations in Cameroon. 

“But the local people always knew drills and gorillas existed,” Jenkins says. “As a species, drills were even more endangered than gorillas, and very little was known about them.”

The rehabilitation project began with an orphaned baby drill named after the capital city of Calabar, in which she had been rescued. Over the next three years, Gadsby and Jenkins traversed Nigeria’s southeast and southwest Cameroon in a Land Rover, trekking through forests and interviewing hunters with clues about the primate species. 

In those days, Jenkins recalls seeing drills held captive by villagers after their mothers had been killed for meat. To protect these orphaned drills, they first opened a drill sanctuary in Calabar, the state’s capital, later establishing a natural habitat for drills in Boki.

Rather than deploy force to retrieve the primates, Gadsby and Jenkins turned to dialogue—visiting schools, embarking on outreaches, and persuading the locals to surrender orphaned drills. 

“In those days, people were open-minded and appreciated new ideas. We simply approached them and said, ‘This is what we want to do. Do you agree?’ And they basically agreed, after typically lengthy discussions and sharing of ideas,” Gadsby explains.

Their diplomatic approach soon paid off. The project has so far received as many as 90 drills from the locals. 

More often than not, the animals are named after a person or place, depending on where they are found. One drill that was recovered last December in Enugu was named “Onoh,” after its former keeper. 

Releasing the animals for rehabilitation in the ranch, says Gadsby, gave the locals more stakes in the project. In addition to reintegrating the primates, the conservation ranch has strengthened ties among 18 communities in Boki.

Around 1993, rangers were selected from each community to patrol the forests and stop poachers from killing endangered animals.

“This wasn’t a government project. It was community sanctioned, funded by us, and supervised by us, but entirely staffed by the citizens of the traditional landlord communities, typically ex-hunters,” explains Gadsby. 

The objective was clear. 

“When rangers caught a poacher, they would take him back to his community and let them decide on the punishment, whether it was [to buy] a crate of beer, a goat, or something else. This way, the community benefited directly,” she tells Prime Progress.

This collaboration greatly reduced poaching in Afi Forest in the following years.

In 2000, after a decade of lobbying, parts of the Afi Forest Reserve were designated as the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary by the then-Governor of Cross River State, Donald Duke.

Inside the Drill Ranch

The ranch houses two groups of drills: captive-bred and wild-born. While the former refers to those born on the ranch, the latter are typically those rescued or donated and are medically screened before being introduced to the rest of the troops in an electrically wired enclosure. Each drill is identified by a name and tattoo number.

In addition to 600 drills, the ranch is home to 27 chimpanzees and a soft-shell turtle, including 29 African grey parrots that were seized by the Nigerian authorities from traffickers and brought for rehabilitation in 2021. In 2024, 25 of those parrots were released back into the wild.

The conservation programme has translated into myriad benefits for its neighbouring communities, from roads to boreholes. Together with purchasing animal food products from the farmers, the ranch also engages many community youths in maintaining local infrastructure.

The ranch’s natural-sized drill family groups attract dozens of students and tourists all year round, offering them a close-up study of the primates in the wild. Even former President Olusegun Obasanjo once visited the ranch and planted a tree in the surroundings.

But There are Challenges

Rapid deforestation across large swathes of Boki and Cross River makes it increasingly difficult to reintroduce rehabilitated drills into the wild nowadays, says Zach Schwenneker, the ranch manager. 

Owing to the thriving cocoa trade in the region, many more people cut down the forests—including protected areas—for cultivation, exposing the drills to poachers. 

“In the past three or four years, we have lost two animals to poachers. One was outside the enclosure, and the other was shot inside its enclosure during the day. People do come around, and there is a lot of illegal activity. Anytime there is a daytime gunshot, a primate is the target,” Schwenneker says.

Pandrillus once received monthly government subventions to cater to the animals, but support has waned over the years, stunting conservation efforts. These days, the ranch thrives off international support as well as individual donations.

“We raise a significant amount of money abroad and spend it all in the country. We’ve invested heavily in this project. Each month costs about N24 million ($15,600), with approximately 80% of that going toward animal food and staff salaries,” he said.

Hope for the Future

For Okon, living on the ranch for much of the year is a personal sacrifice to restore biodiversity by keeping Africa’s endangered monkeys alive. 

“If we don’t do the job, not many people would be willing to live in the forest to watch over the animals,” he says. “It is my hope that one day, society will fully appreciate wildlife, and there will be no need for us to remain here because the animals will be able to live freely in the wild.”