Most lists of Senegal’s wildlife are travel roundups with a conservation status wedged into a sidebar. This isn’t that. Every animal here is losing ground, and almost all of them are hanging on in the same 9,000 square kilometers: Niokolo-Koba National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site tucked into the country’s southeast corner along the Gambia River.
That concentration isn’t a coincidence. Niokolo-Koba is Senegal’s last large, intact savanna-forest mosaic, which makes it the last refuge for species that vanished from every other corner of the country decades ago.
TLDR: Senegal’s Endangered Species at a Glance
- West African lion — Critically Endangered subpopulation, roughly 20 left in Senegal
- Western chimpanzee — Critically Endangered, down 80% region-wide since 1990
- African wild dog — Endangered, last West African population survives here
- Giant pangolin — Endangered, rediscovered in Senegal in 2023 after 24 years
- African elephant — Endangered, Niokolo-Koba may be down to a single bull
- Temminck’s red colobus — Endangered, roughly 300 individuals remain in-country
- Dama gazelle — Critically Endangered, fewer than 500 left on Earth
- Senegal flapshell turtle — Vulnerable, hunted and losing wetland habitat
- Senegalese hake — Endangered, collapsing under industrial overfishing
Table of Contents
- West African Lion
- Western Chimpanzee
- African Wild Dog
- Giant Pangolin
- African Elephant
- Temminck’s Red Colobus
- Dama Gazelle
- Senegal Flapshell Turtle
- Senegalese Hake
1. West African Lion
The West African lion is genetically distinct enough from its eastern and southern cousins that some researchers argue it deserves its own species designation. It doesn’t matter much to the lion. What matters is that the IUCN Red List classifies this subpopulation as Critically Endangered, a full tier below the Vulnerable rating given to lions as a species.
Senegal holds around 20 of them, all inside Niokolo-Koba, which also happens to hold one of the largest remaining West African lion populations anywhere. That population has more than doubled over the past decade, thanks to sustained anti-poaching patrols and biological monitoring — a rare good-news trend on this list.
The threat isn’t hunters going after lions directly. It’s snares set for bushmeat that gut the antelope and warthog populations lions need to eat, plus retaliatory killing when hungry lions turn to livestock on the park’s edges.
Where to see it: Niokolo-Koba National Park, though sightings are earned, not guaranteed — this is dense savanna, not a Serengeti-style open plain.
2. Western Chimpanzee
Western chimpanzees got uplisted from Endangered to Critically Endangered in 2016, after researchers tallied an 80% population crash across West Africa between 1990 and 2014, down to roughly 52,800 individuals.
Niokolo-Koba is the only place in Senegal where chimpanzees live under formal protection. Just outside the park boundary sits Fongoli, an unprotected research site made famous for chimps that fashion and use wooden spears to hunt bushbabies out of tree hollows — one of the only documented cases of habitual tool-assisted hunting in a non-human primate.
Gold mining is the newer threat here. Artisanal and industrial mining operations are carving into chimpanzee habitat around the park faster than researchers can track the fallout.
Where to see it: Assirik, inside Niokolo-Koba, or the Fongoli research area just outside it — both require arranging access through park authorities or researchers in advance.
3. African Wild Dog
African wild dogs have already been wiped out of the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex, the other major protected-area cluster in West Africa. That leaves Niokolo-Koba holding the last wild dog population in the entire region — likely somewhere between 50 and 100 animals across the park and its buffer zones.
Wild dogs need enormous territories and hunt in packs across open ground, which makes them collide constantly with snares, roads, and domestic dogs that carry rabies and canine distemper into wild populations with no immunity built up.
Even park staff consider a wild dog sighting a genuine event, not a routine one.
Where to see it: Niokolo-Koba’s more open savanna zones, though this is the least reliable sighting on the list — pack ranges shift constantly and sightings often come down to luck and timing.
4. Giant Pangolin
Nobody had confirmed a giant pangolin in Senegal since 1999. Then in 2023, a camera-trap survey across Niokolo-Koba caught one on film, ending a 24-year gap that had researchers assuming the species was gone from the country entirely.
Pangolins are the most trafficked mammals on Earth, hunted for scales bound mostly for traditional medicine markets in Asia and for bushmeat closer to home. Giant pangolins are now protected under Senegalese law, with hunting and trade explicitly prohibited — though enforcement across a park this size is its own challenge.
The rediscovery matters because it confirms Niokolo-Koba still supports a species that had effectively disappeared from the country’s wildlife inventory.
Where to see it: Realistically, you won’t. Pangolins are nocturnal, solitary, and this rediscovery came from a camera trap, not a ranger’s binoculars.
5. African Elephant
In the late 1970s, Niokolo-Koba held roughly 450 elephants. Decades of ivory and meat poaching brought that down to somewhere between 5 and 10 by the early 2000s. Recent camera-trap surveys covering the entire park have found evidence of exactly one: a lone bull researchers have nicknamed the “Ghost Elephant,” photographed periodically since he was rediscovered on film in the 2023–2024 monitoring cycle.
The African savanna elephant was listed as Endangered by the IUCN in March 2021, and Niokolo-Koba’s population is about as close to the edge of local extinction as a large mammal population gets without actually crossing it. Conservationists have floated relocating elephants from other African populations to rebuild a breeding group here, though nothing has moved past discussion.
Where to see it: Nowhere reliably. One elephant across 9,000 square kilometers is a needle in a very large haystack.
6. Temminck’s Red Colobus
Temminck’s red colobus is listed as Endangered, and Senegal’s population — concentrated in Niokolo-Koba — sits at roughly 300 individuals. That’s a meaningful chunk of the subspecies’ entire known population of around 2,500, which has dropped more than 50% over the last 30 years.
Hunting pressure already extirpated this colobus from Casamance National Park further south, which puts extra weight on Niokolo-Koba as one of the last strongholds anywhere. Red colobus monkeys are often described by primatologists as the most endangered group of monkeys in Africa, and this population is a case study in why: hunted for bushmeat, squeezed into fragmented forest patches, and offering none of the poaching-deterrent value that ivory or big cats attract in funding and enforcement.
Where to see it: Gallery forests along Niokolo-Koba’s rivers, where troops stay close to water and dense canopy cover.
7. Dama Gazelle
The dama gazelle holds the grim distinction of being one of the most endangered antelope species alive, with the global population under 500 individuals and only 100 to 200 of those mature enough to breed. It disappeared from Senegal’s wild decades ago, alongside disappearing from Mauritania and Sudan, hunted out and squeezed by livestock competing for the same sparse Sahelian grazing.
What makes Senegal notable is the comeback attempt. Conservation groups have used protected reserves in the country’s Ferlo region as breeding and reintroduction ground, working to rebuild a wild population from captive stock rather than simply documenting the species’ disappearance. It’s slow, unglamorous work, and success is measured in single-digit gains, not headlines.
Where to see it: Reintroduction and breeding sites in the Ferlo region, north of Niokolo-Koba — check with Senegal’s national parks authority before visiting, as access to breeding stock areas is restricted.
8. Senegal Flapshell Turtle
The Senegal flapshell turtle carries the country’s name and a Vulnerable IUCN status that reflects steady, unglamorous decline rather than a dramatic collapse. It lives in rivers, floodplains, and seasonal wetlands across the Sahel, including the Senegal and Gambia River systems.
Its problems are the boring kind that rarely make headlines: hunted for meat in riverside communities, and losing wetland habitat as dams and agricultural water diversion reshape the rivers it depends on. Freshwater turtles across West Africa get a fraction of the conservation attention megafauna receive, despite similar trajectories toward trouble. For a broader look at the reptiles sharing Senegal’s landscapes with this endangered turtle, explore the complete list of reptiles of Senegal.
Where to see it: Slow-moving stretches of the Gambia River within Niokolo-Koba, and wetlands along the broader Senegal River basin.
9. Senegalese Hake
The one species on this list that never sets foot on land. Senegalese hake is a deep-water fish found off the northwest African coast, typically 100 to 600 meters down, and it carries an Endangered IUCN status driven by industrial fishing pressure rather than habitat loss or poaching.
Senegal’s waters sit at the intersection of local artisanal fleets and foreign industrial trawlers, and hake stocks off West Africa have been fished well past sustainable levels for years. Unlike lions or elephants, there’s no single park boundary that protects a fish stock spread across an entire coastline and international fishing agreements.
Where to see it: You won’t, unless you’re on a research trawl. This is a species conserved through fishing quotas and treaties, not park visits.
Nine species, one throughline: nearly everything on this list either lives in Niokolo-Koba or has already vanished from everywhere in Senegal that isn’t Niokolo-Koba. A single park carrying this much of a country’s endangered wildlife is either a remarkable conservation asset or a single point of failure, depending on how the next decade of anti-poaching funding goes.
