Covering 430 square miles (1120 square km) and has a Sudanese savannah ecosystem. Country instability in 2021 lead to the park closing for a time. Located in Kaduna state, this is a particularly built up area. When I stayed there in 2005, our hosts lived on a large grassy unused area; our hosts said that just 10 years earlier there would have been zebra and giraffe roaming this area, but these were long gone when I visited.

Kwiambana Game Reserve borders it to the South East, and it became a national park in 1999. It supports 19 species of mammals including elephants (a major ecotourism attraction for visitors to the Park), roan antelopes, duikers, hartebeest, baboons, warthog, bushbuck, patas monkeys, and green monkeys. There are at least 177 species of birds, including migrants and residents] The park is important for species such as the secretarybird, Denham’s bustard and the Abyssinian ground-hornbill which are rare in other parts of Nigeria.

Both hunting and illegal cattle grazing is a real problem around the edges of the park which, while currently not threatening the whole reserve, but may well, should this continue. There is some significant space for more tourism, which could allow the local area, and the countries government to protect this reserve, and potentially, allow it to grow slowly over time, so as to properly protect its ecosystem.