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 and sell it as bushmeat. Today, he uses them to find wire snares hidden beneath leaf litter and to track down the poachers who still slip into Omo Forest Reserve, one of Nigeria's last rainforests.
Abiodun, in his early 40s, grew up in Ogun State in southwestern Nigeria, where hunting ran in the family. "My father was a hunter, and so was my grandfather," he says. "It was our way of life." Among the animals he hunted were pangolins, now among the most heavily trafficked mammals in the world. He had hoped to pass the tradition on to his own son.
But as an adult, he noticed the forest changing. Buffalo and leopards that had been common in his childhood became scarce. "I realized something wasn't right," he says. In 2017, he joined the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) as a volunteer ranger, and he has spent the years since protecting the very forest where he once hunted.
The NCF, founded in the 1980s, is one of Nigeria's oldest conservation organizations. Omo Forest Reserve spans about 130,500 hectares and forms part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, sheltering forest elephants, chimpanzees and the endangered white-throated guenon, a type of monkey. But like most of Nigeria's remaining rainforest, it has steadily lost ground to illegal logging and poaching.
Across the country, the pressures are severe. In 2025 alone, Nigeria lost roughly 240,000 hectares of natural forest — about 1.2 percent of what it had left. "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.
At Omo, the NCF has tried a novel approach. Instead of relying only on trained conservation officers, it recruits former hunters and poachers as rangers. The idea, says project manager Emmanuel Olabode, is 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," he says.
Abiodun is one of about 10 former poachers now working as rangers. A regular salary helped make the switch possible, but so did seeing the forest vanish around him. New recruits train in wildlife protection, patrol techniques and community engagement, followed by a three-month probation period working alongside experienced rangers.
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. As Dr. Ofua puts it: "It's just a change of mindset — from being a killer of animals to a protector of animals."