Tourism: First-ever images of rare antelope spotted in nature reserve in Togo, West Africa

The first-ever images of a live Walter’s duiker, a petite African antelope species, in the wild has emerged, following a recent camera trap survey at the Fazao-Malfakassa National Park, a Togolese nature reserve.

Report from gizmodo.com reveal that the traps also caught aardvarks and a mongoose species, neither of which had previously been reported in Togo. The team’s findings were published this week in the African Journal of Ecology.

“Camera traps are a game changer when it comes to biodiversity survey fieldwork,” co-author Neil D’Cruze, a wildlife biologist at the University of Oxford, said in an email.

“I’ve spent weeks roughing it in tropical forests seemingly devoid of any large mammal species. Yet when you fire up the laptop and stick in the memory card from camera traps that have been sitting there patiently during the entire trip — and see species that were there with you the entire time — it’s like being given a glimpse into a parallel world.”

Using camera traps allowed the research team to stop relying on information from bushmeat hunters, who bring carcasses of the rare animal to market.

Instead, to get a pulse on the region’s fauna, they planted 100 camera traps around Fazao-Malfakassa National Park in central Togo, which covers an area a little larger than Houston, Texas. By the time the survey concluded, the team managed to identify 32 mammal species, which brings the total number of reported mammal species in the area to nearly 60.