This area is very much known for its forest elephants. This is what is called a bai. It is a natural, open, marshy, grassy area within the dense forest to which elephants and other animals come in and probe down into muds for mineral salts. It's like a salt lick anywhere in the world. These are forest elephants, and probably not a separate species from the savannah elephant. This is an interesting thing. A lot of people have said well, they're smaller, they have different color tusks and so forth. They probably are a separate species from the savannah elephant. But actually, when you get in and really look at the geographic variation, you begin to see that it's clinal. It's called clinal variation because the populations have been more or less continuous across the range of these elephants, and elephants in the forest have just evolved smaller size and different characteristics. But those appear to grade morphologically into populations as you go out toward the savannah. There is not a clear demarcation, so under a biological species concept, we would say there's one species and under a phylogentic species we would say there's one species.

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