The Perilous Life of the Solitary Pangolin
Think of a cat. Then add scales.
That’s how Mercia Angela describes the pangolins she cares for at the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where she runs the country’s only rescue center for the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal. “They sleep a lot,” she says.
Pangolins are nocturnal by nature and elusive in the wild, preferring to burrow in savannas and floodplains, or scrabble up trees in wooded areas where they can remain out of sight. Yet, despite their demure ways, they are the focus of a harrowing drama, their species poached to near extinction by a massive and illegal worldwide trade.
That’s where Angela’s rehab center—and the lush sprawl of Gorongosa as a whole—come in. It’s been a little more than three decades since the ravages of Mozambique’s 15-year civil war, by which time Gorongosa’s population of large mammals had shrunk by 95 percent. Antelope had been slaughtered to feed troops and hundreds of elephants had been killed, their tusks traded for guns. Pangolins didn’t fare any better. For centuries, their meat has been prized as a delicacy in Southeast Asia, and their scales valued in traditional medicinal practices in China. In the West, pangolins barely had a public profile until they were briefly but implicated as a possible origin of the COVID-19 virus. Now, because populations in Southeast Asia have been decimated, the pangolins native to sub-Saharan Africa are being caught in poachers’
