Shocking.

This is very recent, no?

Oh, got tree in the middle of the road.

Elephant pushed it over looking for palm fruits.

Dominique, you think this is elephant damage?

Elephant maintenance?

Yeah.

I like that.

We're clearly on the right track.

Elephants were here just before we arrived.

Incredible to me that an animal that big can be so cryptic.

And ambush you.

Yeah.

I hear.

á*Speaking Foreign Languageá* Dominique thinks the elephants á*Speaking Foreign Languageá* Dominique thinks the elephants might be headed to a waterhole called Paradise Pan for a drink.

Can you see it from there?

Yeah, it's here.

á*Speaking Foreign Languageá* I hear something walking in the palms We have arrived.

Welcome to Paradise.

When you see them up close, the tusk-less elephants are hard to miss.

Female African elephants normally have tusks, just like the males.

But more than a third of Gorongosa females have no tusks at all.

To understand what happened, you need to know a little about Mozambique's history.

Well, you have to remember Gorongosa was one of the battlefields.

Yeah and a lot of bad things happened in this place during the war.

Wow.

Dominique is talking about the Mozambican civil war, a bloody conflict that raged from 1977 to 1992.

You can still see the scars of war all over the park.

The driving force of conservation is people.

If people are poor, you are not going to succeed.

á*Music Playsá* This is Pedro Muagura, Gorongosas Park warden.

When he's not managing the park's million plus acres of forest wetland and savanna, he's getting his hands dirty planting trees and singing for anyone who will listen.

á*Singing in Foreign Languageá* The Gorongosa I'm seeing today á*Singing in Foreign Languageá* The Gorongosa I'm seeing today is very different from what existed here before the war.

Before civil War, this park was very rich.

When we talk about top two in Africa, we're talking about Serengeti, Gorongosa, Kruger National Park.

The structure we're standing on right now used to be a hotspot for tourists.

They called it Hippo House.

They used to come and camp nearby.

And this was used as a bar.

From here, you can see hippos.

Are able to see hippos?

There is hippos.

Yeah.

And some of the parts of this house were destroyed during war.

Pedro's first experience in Gorongosa was in 1992, right after the Civil War.

I was teaching forestry and wildlife management.

And I used to come with the students to do animal identification.

The problem was there weren't many animals left to identify.

In terms of mammals, we used to spend two to three days to view one baboon.

Wow.

And we're talking about lions, and we're not talking about elephants.

The war had devastated the park's wildlife.

When you have war, the first area to be destroyed is nature.

Protected areas.

Forestry.

Wild animals here were used like bank.

They used to exchange these wild animals products, okay, with ammunitions, firearms, uniforms.

Many species were hunted to provision the armies with meat.

But elephants with their ivory tusks were an even more valuable commodity.

Gorongosas elephant population crashed from 2500 to less than 200.

A loss of more than 90% in just sixteen years.

And half the female survivors were tusk-less, nearly three times as many as before the war.