- With decades of civil war, habitat loss and targeted poaching, the Angolan giraffe disappeared from much of its historic range in Angola.
- July marked their return to the country’s Bicuar National Park after a 25-year absence, as part of a broader national development plan.
- The Angolan government and a conservation nonprofit transported 12 giraffes from Namibia to rewild them.
- So far, the giraffes are doing well and, if they thrive in their new habitat, more relocations are planned for Bicuar and other Angolan parks over the next decade.
Peering left and right, the giraffe takes several measured steps down the truck’s ramp.
It’s late July and the animal’s brown and cream coat contrasts with a pure blue sky overhead. The giraffe steps off onto the scrubby vegetation and is quickly joined by a companion. With tails flicking back and forth, the pair take their time moving away from the truck that has brought them here, to Bicuar National Park in southwest Angola. They’d endured a 48-hour drive from their natal home in Namibia.
In a video of the giraffes’ release shared by the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF), the animals look in the direction of conservationists who are gathered a safe distance away and at the trees scattered along the horizon. Then, as a third giraffe joins them, they canter away.
Angola’s National Institute for Biodiversity and Protected Areas (INBAC) and the GCF, a Namibia-based nonprofit, worked together to make this happen.
Twelve Angolan giraffes became the first of the subspecies to set foot in Bicuar National Park in roughly 25 years. Habitat loss and poachers had wiped them out here. The animals were also wildlife victims of Angola’s brutal, 27-year civil war, which raged from 1975-2002 and left the country in ruins. The animals disappeared from much of their historic range in the country.
The giraffes reintroduction is part of a wider Angolan development plan to improve national park management, created in alignment with the National Giraffe Conservation Action Plan for Angola (2026–2030), recently endorsed by the country’s president, João Lourenço.
In 2023 and 2024, GCF reintroduced Angolan giraffes to the country’s Iona National Park. Those animals are doing well so far, but reintroduction can be a tricky business and time will tell if giraffes also thrive in Bicuar. Early signs are positive, said GCF executive director Stephanie Fennessy, and their presence could pave the way for future conservation efforts.
“They can act as a really good umbrella species … because they’re high profile but not threatening,” she told Mongabay. “Bringing giraffe back to a landscape can really help to then protect this landscape for reintroduction of other species over time as well.”
Coming back home
Giraffes were formerly considered a single species with between eight and 11 subspecies. Following a taxonomic review published last August, the IUCN recognized four distinct species instead — three of which have their own subspecies.
The Angolan giraffe (Giraffa giraffa angolensis), a subspecies of the southern giraffe (Giraffa giraffa), roams through forests, savannahs and shrublands across southern Africa.
Roughly 15,663 Angolan giraffes remain in their native range of Angola, Botswana and Namibia, and around 100 live outside those areas in Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a 2025 GCF report.
Fennessy said she would guess that Bicuar National Park lost the last of its population about 25 years ago.
She’s part of the IUCN’s giraffe specialist group, and she and her collaborators recently submitted new assessments for all four species. She hopes these results will be included in the IUCN’s updated Red List, which should be released in November.
Southern giraffes are doing well compared to the other three species, she said, but are still targeted by poachers and continue to lose habitat as land is converted to farmland and settlements and cut by roads.
Angola is still in recovery mode from decades of armed conflict that killed 500,000-800,000 people, devastated wildlife and saw national parks abandoned. Now, “tourism has emerged as a promising prospect for Angola,” said Noé Pinto, head of INBAC’s Department of Conservation Areas, in an email to Mongabay. But “it is essential to improve the management of the parks and reserves,” Pinto said. “And the reintroduction of species is seen as one of the key factors in accelerating this development.”
Rewilding and restoring Bicuar
The Bicuar rewilding project falls under the umbrella of Angola’s national development plan. Goals include protecting biodiversity and promoting environmental education. It’s part of a longer-term initiative to restore giraffes to suitable habitat nationwide.
Giraffes are critical ecosystem engineers. They forage at greater heights than other herbivores, naturally pruning canopy vegetation in trees such as acacias. By browsing in loftier spots, giraffes clear the way for sunlight to reach shorter foliage, stimulating undergrowth. They also disperse seeds.
When successful, reintroductions allow giraffes to step back into these ecosystem roles. Moving giraffes can also make the species more resilient to local threats with a. strong gene pool, while restoring populations within their historical range.
But reintroduction isn’t as simple as moving a group of giraffes to an open area and turning them loose.
“It is not enough that an area is fenced, protected, or was historically designated as a reserve or national park,” said Francois Deacon, a giraffe researcher with South Africa’s University of the Free State, in an email to Mongabay. “None of these factors automatically means that it currently provides suitable giraffe habitat.”
The key, he said, is assessing the habitat for the right vegetation, and evaluating the amount of usable space, seasonal changes in food availability, water distribution, disease risk and other factors. Without properly gauging ecological requirements, reintroductions can fail.
As part of the planning for the Bicuar relocation, the joint government-NGO team of INBAC and GCF produced habitat and translocation feasibility assessments in 2025, GCF’s Fennessy said.
“We don’t just move giraffe on a whim,” she added. “We really do our homework.”
Angolan giraffes from two different locations in Namibia served as the founder populations. In most of southern Africa, wildlife can be privately owned, Fennessy said, and in this case, GCF bought the giraffes from farmers who wanted to shrink their populations. One was concerned he had too many animals to survive an expected drought, Fennessy said.
The 12 young giraffes — three males and nine females — rode to their new home in a truck large enough for them to stand or lie down in. Other than the truck temporarily getting stuck on a sandy road, the reintroduction went smoothly, Fennessy said.
The team tagged each giraffe’s tail with a GPS device so their locations can be monitored.
GCF is carefully tracking the park’s new residents and, so far, they seem to be doing well. The giraffes reach sexual maturity at 3-5 years old, Fennessy said. They likely won’t breed for another few years, so she’s not expecting to see calves immediately.
“In the end, we want to see a growing population in three to four years,” she said.
That process has already begun in Iona National Park: In August, GCF announced the first calf was born to that reintroduced population.
Protecting the areas where giraffes live is also critical to their long-term success. Poachers often target giraffes for their meat, spotted skins, bones and the brown or black tassel of hair that hangs from their tails. Between 2006 and 2015, the U.S. alone imported 21,402 giraffe bone carvings and 3,008 pieces of giraffe skin, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
However, Bicuar is one of the safest national parks in Angola, INBAC’s Pinto said, with very low levels of poaching.
The tricks to translocation
There are hundreds of instances where translocated giraffes have been successful, for example in Uganda, Namibia, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana, Fennessy said.
“[In] Namibia, you can own giraffes privately, and there are a lot of farms where literally someone said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a giraffe?’, and they buy three: two females and a male,” she said. “And 20 years down the line, they have a thriving population.”
Giraffes seem to be fairly resilient to in-breeding, she said. But that may not be the case over the long term. A population modeling study published in the journal Endangered Species Research suggests that giraffe populations founded with 10 or fewer females “can appear to be successful in the first decades,” but it takes 30 or more females to get long-term viability, which the researchers defined as a less than 0.01 probability of extinction after 100 years.
It would be extremely difficult and costly to relocate 30 females, so experts note the need to restore habitat connectivity wherever possible, which will allow giraffes to recolonize their former territories.
Rewilding was, however, the only way to bring giraffes back to Bicuar, Fennessy said. The park is isolated, surrounded by privately-owned and communal farmland, and while connectivity is very important, “we also have to be realistic,” she said. “In some areas, it’s just not possible anymore because there are too many people, there’s too much agriculture, there’s too much private land.”
Moving forward, if Bicuar’s giraffes do well, GCF will bring in another group to fortify their numbers. Over the next decade, it also plans to bring giraffes to Angola’s Chimalavera Regional Park and Kissama National Park.
“We always say saving giraffes is a long game,” Fennessy said. “Not a quick game.”
Banner image: GCF and team members observe giraffes in the capture funnel. This temporary structure was set up to capture the giraffes and guide them into the truck that transported them to Bicuar National Park. Image courtesy of Giraffe Conservation Foundation / Empowers Africa / Keenan Ferguson.
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Citation:
Lee, D., Fienieg, E., Van Oosterhout, C., Muller, Z., Strauss, M., Carter, K., … Deacon, F. (2020). Giraffe translocation population viability analysis. Endangered Species Research, 41, 245-252. doi:
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Cite this article
Alex Megerle (2026). First Angolan giraffes return to Bicuar National Park after 25 years. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-330292Credits
