SDZWA Stories

Eighteen-hundred acres of land in the San Pasqual Valley and a vision of what wildlife conservation could become. That’s what Dr. Charles Schroeder had back in 1969 when we broke ground for the Wild Animal Park, Dr. Schroeder’s “zoo of the future.” As executive director of the Zoological Society of San Diego, Dr. Schroeder had big plans for his “natural environment zoo,” with its expansive, multispecies savanna habitats and revolutionary approach to wildlife management that would forever change what zoos would look like.

When guests see a red panda at the San Diego Zoo, their first reaction is often “what’s that?” What they see is a fiery red-orange and reddish-brown mammal about the size of a large house cat, with a round face, keen eyes, distinctive white and brown markings, a long, fluffy tail, and a fondness for climbing trees. But it’s not a cat. It’s not a fox or a raccoon. And it’s not a bear. It's a red panda!

Cameroon’s Ebo forest is one of the last remaining sites inhabited by forest elephants in the entire Gulf of Guinea biodiversity hotspot—the area of tropical Central Africa to the northwest of the Congo basin. Since we first established trail cameras in the forest in 2016, we have gathered a wealth of evidence of African forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis presence, despite the fact that the cameras are currently restricted to the relatively small area (approximately 40 square kilometers, or roughly 15 square miles) of the Ebo gorilla range.