Sunday Abiodun can often tell an animal is nearby before he sees it — from a broken twig or the way birds suddenly stop singing. For 15 years, he used those instincts to hunt wildlife to feed his family or to sell as bushmeat. Now he uses those same instincts to find wire snares hidden beneath leaf litter and track the poachers who still enter Omo Forest Reserve, one of Nigeria’s last rainforests.
“I met hunting at home,” he says. “My father was a hunter, and so was my grandfather. It was our way of life.” In his early 40s, Abiodun is from Ogun State, in southwestern Nigeria, and never questioned his family’s tradition of hunting. He had hoped to pass it on to his son. Among the animals he hunted were pangolins, now among the world’s most heavily trafficked mammals.
It was not until he was an adult that he noticed the forest was changing. Animals, including buffalo and leopards, that had been common during his childhood had become scarce.
“I realized something wasn’t right,” he says.
In 2017, he joined the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) as a volunteer ranger and has spent the years since protecting the same forest where he once hunted.
Turning hunters into protectors
Founded in the 1980s, the NCF is one of Nigeria’s oldest conservation organizations. Today, it works with government agencies and local communities to protect forests and wildlife across the country. One of its biggest conservation efforts is in Omo Forest Reserve, where it runs anti-poaching patrols and works with nearby communities to protect the forest.
The reserve spans about 130,500 hectares and forms part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It shelters forest elephants, chimpanzees and the endangered white-throated guenon (a type of monkey). But like much of Nigeria’s remaining rainforest, it has continuously lost ground to illegal logging and poaching.
“The state of our forests leaves much to be desired,” says Dr. Mark Ofua, a wildlife veterinarian and West African representative for the nonprofit Wild Africa. Years of illegal logging, agricultural expansion and poaching, he says, have steadily eroded ecosystems that support both wildlife and the communities that depend on them.
Omo is far from the only forest under pressure. Across Nigeria, these pressures on forests continue to shrink wildlife habitat. In 2025 alone, the country lost about 240,000 hectares of natural forest — roughly 1.2 percent of its remaining natural forest cover.
At Omo, however, the NCF has taken a novel approach. Rather than relying only on trained conservation officers, it recruits former hunters and poachers as rangers. The idea, says Emmanuel Olabode, who manages the project, is rooted in the belief that the people who know the forest best are often the ones who once hunted in it.
“Their deep understanding of the forest, combined with appropriate training, has significantly strengthened our wildlife protection efforts while creating sustainable livelihood opportunities for members of the local communities,” says Olabode.
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Dr. Ofua agrees. “They already know the ways of the forest. They know the ways of animals. They know the dangers,” he says. “It’s just a change of mindset — from being a killer of animals to a protector of animals.”
Abiodun is one of about 10 former poachers now working as rangers in Omo. A regular salary helped make the transition possible, but it wasn’t the only motivation. The fact that he’d needed to go deeper and deeper into the forest for animals that had once been easy to find made him take a harder look at what was going on around him.
Olabode says Abiodun’s experience mirrors that of many hunters in the area: “Persistent poaching, coupled with declining wildlife populations, was making hunting increasingly unproductive and unsustainable.” Through community engagement, he says, some hunters came to see conservation as both a more sustainable livelihood and a way to restore the forest they depended on.
Before joining the ranger team full-time, recruits undergo training in wildlife protection, patrol techniques, wildlife monitoring and community engagement, followed by a three-month probation period working alongside experienced rangers, according to Olabode.
Today, Abiodun spends week-long rotations at Elephant Camp, a solar-powered outpost deep inside the reserve. Rangers patrol on foot and by motorcycle, removing snares, arresting poachers, clearing illegal farms and restoring degraded patches of forest with native trees.
“Many former poachers become passionate conservationists once they understand the importance of protecting wildlife,” says Dr. Ofua.
Signs the forest is coming back
There are signs the approach is working. Camera traps have captured forest elephants returning to parts of the reserve where they had not been seen for years. Rangers have also recorded fresh elephant dung, more sightings of white-throated guenons, and native vegetation reclaiming land once stripped by logging.
Dr. Ofua says the presence of the elephants is important for more than just their own survival: By eating fruit and dispersing seeds across the forest, they help regenerate the ecosystem. Their return suggests the forest — not just a single species — is beginning to recover.
For Abiodun, though, the biggest change has been personal. Part of his job now involves working with nearby communities, explaining why wildlife matters. He tells residents how pangolins help control insect populations that damage crops and how vultures reduce the spread of disease by feeding on animal carcasses.
“I work closely with them, helping them understand that we must work collectively to protect what’s left for our benefit and for generations to come,” he says.
The program has not solved every challenge facing Omo. Ten rangers are responsible for protecting a forest that is difficult to patrol due to its size and terrain. While poaching remains a concern, rangers say illegal logging and cocoa farming have become even bigger threats, with many offenders returning after arrest because prosecutions rarely follow.
According to Dr. Ofua, weak enforcement remains one of conservation’s biggest obstacles. “Sometimes when I report poachers, I have to explain the relevant wildlife laws to officers before they act,” he says.
Even so, he believes the conversion of former poachers to protectors of the forest creates a change that goes beyond the people directly involved.
“Poaching often runs in families,” he says. “By the time you make a conservationist out of one of them, you have broken that vicious cycle because his son is going to meet a conservationist, not a poacher.”
For Abiodun, that cycle has already been broken. The instincts that he deployed to hunt now help protect one of Nigeria’s last remaining rainforests, and this new tradition is the one he will pass down to his children.