An amazing tale of survival has emerged from the forests of Liberia, where camera traps have revealed that pygmy hippos have endured despite two civil wars and a 90% loss of their habitat.

Only one hippo was snapped walking past one of the automatic cameras, and later returning for a second photo call, but given the rarity of these animals that’s quite a find, according to Ben Collen, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London.

“The pygmy hippo is an extraordinary, mysterious creature that has almost never been seen in the wild,” says Collen (press release). “We were delighted to discover that a population still persists there, but remain highly concerned for the species, which continues to face significant threats from poaching and habitat degradation.”

According to the ZSL, forestry and mining have devastated the Upper Guinean forest and only 10% of it now remains. Of this remnant 40% is in Liberia.

On his story about the trip, on the ZSL’s Edge of Existence website, Collen says

We believe these to be the first photographic records of wild pygmy hippos in Liberia, and perhaps the second ever globally (the only previous picture we can trace is from Sierra Leone, in 2006). It’s fantastic, but only the start. Our cameras remain in the field, and we only downloaded a subset of the cameras before we returned.

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Image: ZSL