Floating through restored mangrove forests aboard a brightly painted wooden pirogue, travelers find themselves a part of a truly inspiring local conservation success story. This thriving sanctuary is packed with iconic avian highlights—from gaggles of noisy Spur-winged Lapwing to the magnificent Giant Kingfisher. But this vibrant ecosystem isn’t just a paradise for birdwatchers; it’s a community-led lifeline. Here´s how a 7-year collaboration between Inglorious Bustards and the Gambia Bird Watchers Association (GBWA) successfully planted over 114 hectares of mangroves, empowering local guides, locking away tonnes of carbon, and bringing a wild coastal haven back to life.
December 2025, and whilst the Northern Hemisphere is shuddering under its usual blanket of midwinter gloom, we are basking in glorious Gambian sunshine and soaking up the vibrant, colourful wildlife of Kotu Creek. Our brilliant friends at the Gambia Bird Watchers Association (GBWA) have laid on an absolute treat for us—a slow, guided cruise through the meandering creeks of the local mangrove forest.
Drifting through this serene landscape on a brightly painted wooden craft, the tranquility is absolute. The deep, heavy silence is punctuated only by the delicate plop and splash of guide Ebru´s oars, and the birds and fish catching water-insects skating the surface of the mirror-like water. Two-metre-high branches embrace and shade the humid air and root tendrils cascade downwards into the depths.
Throwback to the summer of 2019, when the GBWA and a magnificent army of local volunteers were out in the mud, planting these very trees as tiny propagules. When our group visited later that year in December, we saw the tantalising first signs of success: a whopping 60% survival rate, casting a satisfying haze of green across the mudflats. Another 2.5 hectares were added the following year, expanding into the lush 4.5-hectare haven we’re floating through today. The atmosphere here is so atmospheric and immersive, it feels as though the forest stretches on forever.
Empowering Local Communities and Guiding Livelihoods
This restored showcase area isn’t just a win for nature; it’s an incredible engine for community-led ecotourism, delighting hardcore birders and casual tourists alike. The GBWA now owns three traditional wooden boats, which registered local guides can book out entirely for free. Guides earn around £10 per guest for a two-hour excursion—meaning a fleet that started as just one lone craft is now able to put hundreds of pounds directly into the local economy every day of the high season.
Our guide, Ebru, poetically describes the red mangrove as the “walking forest,” referring to its steady, mysterious march out into the creek, aided by the floating seeds of nearby white mangroves. It’s this natural resilience that makes mangroves such a knockout choice for ecosystem restoration—provided you have the right expertise, honed by the GBWA over the efforts of a seven-year project.
They’ve learned heaps since that initial pilot plot, too. By tweaking planting densities and refining their methods, propagule survival rates have jumped from 60% right up to 75%! Kotu Creek is really just the glittering gateway to even vaster, quieter expanses unseen by most human eyes around Sting Corner and Abuko Nature Reserve. Out there, a further 110 hectares have been restored—representing more than 1,000 bags of hand-planted propagules and the hard graft of 300 passionate volunteers from surrounding villages.
The Superpowers of the Mangrove Ecosystem
Yet despite their magic, mangroves everywhere are fighting off serious threats: land erosion, plastic pollution, and unsustainable timber cutting. Deforested riverbanks release heavy silt downstream, choking the River Gambia’s vital arteries. They’re also on the front lines of climate change, where erratic rainfall and tidal surges spike soil salinity and degrade coastal swamps across West Africa. Active restoration of damaged zones is, quite simply, our best weapon to safeguard what’s left.
Because Kotu Creek is a protected reserve, destructive fishing is strictly off-limits, allowing the roots to act as a crucial marine nursery. Sheltered tiny fry grow up here safely, and those lucky enough to dodge the sharp bills of Western Reef Herons eventually head out to sea as healthy, mature fish. Even tilapia—that staple of the Gambian dinner table—depend on these calm waters to form shoals and support local fisherfolk.
Unsurprisingly, local fishers are already reporting larger catches of fish and crabs, an observation enthusiastically confirmed by the bewildering variety of kingfishers patrolling the branches above. Plastic waste remains an unwanted nuisance, washing off the new road every rainy season, but the tangled prop-roots act as a giant natural strainer, catching the rubbish where it can be removed by the determined boats and hands of the GBWA and their volunteers before it ever hits the open ocean.
As we love to remind our guests, mangroves are pure ecological magic. Their labyrinthine roots absorb the brutal energy of storm surges, shielding vulnerable coastal communities. They filter out heavy sediments and pollutants, shelter some of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet, and hoard up to five times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforests. The 114.5 hectares restored through this collaborative project can lock away up to 8 metric tonnes of CO2 every year. That’s enough to offset our entire group’s international flights forty times over! (though, naturally, our travel is already fully offset through World Land Trust!).
Best of all, many of our all-time favourite avian species rely heavily on this rich habitat. Absolute stompers such as the elusive African Finfoot, the legendary Pel’s Fishing Owl, White-backed Night Heron, Blue Paradise Flycatcher, Goliath Heron, African Fish Eagle, and Greater Painted-snipe all find homes in mangroves as well as all the bee-eater species that occur here and half a dozen kingfisher species, scaling all the way from the hyperactive Pied Kingfisher to the massive Giant Kingfisher.
It fills us with immense pride to look down at the bow and see the name painted on the side: Inglorious Bustard. It’s a wonderfully touching nod for funding two of the fleet’s boats and the creation of 114.5 hectares of thriving mangrove wilderness—a habitat brought to life by the sheer grit, passion, and expertise of the GBWA and their incredible team of volunteers.
