Grand Elephant Central

After the Amazon, the Congo Basin is the largest rainforest in the world. It expands in all directions, smothering the landscape in green and cloaking the highest biodiversity of life in Africa.

At ground level, a wall of thorns and dense thicket blockades a mysterious inner world. Most of the Congo jungle is unexplored... and its treasure trove of life forms have largely remained unstudied.

This started to change in the early 1990's by the chance discovery of large areas cut out of the jungle canopy in the north-west region of the Congo Basin. Aerial survey and satellite images revealed a patchwork of swampy clearings, known locally as ‘bais’. Most of the areas seemed to be open meadows, with a water course flowing through them. The oases were teeming with life. Large mammals, such as forest buffalo, lowland gorillas and large numbers of forest elephants, could be observed peacefully wading and grazing in the mud and waters.

In the Odzala region of the Congo Basin, thousands of forest elephants are drawn to perhaps the most famous of these jungle clearings, called Dzanga Bai. Recent research has discovered that the elephants probably built the bai as well as the surrounding network of interconnecting forest highways. This elephant-engineered road system helps many species navigate through the forest.