Notes and records Photographic evidence of Jentink’s duiker in the Gola Forest Reserves, Sierra Leone Jessica Ganas 1,2 * and Jeremy A. Lindsell 1 1 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy, Beds, SG19 2DL, UK and 2 Gola Forest Programme, 164 Dama Road, Kenema, Sierra Leone Introduction The forest ungulate Jentink’s duiker (Thomas, 1892, Cephalophus jentinki), is endemic to the western portion of the Upper Guinea forest region (Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone) and is one of the rarest duikers in Africa (Davies & Birkenha ¨ger, 1990). The paucity of information on the size of the population, the small extent of their range, and the seriousness of threats from habitat loss and hunting that they have faced in the last twenty years have led to their recent upgrading from vulnerable to endan- gered by IUCN (2008). Their ecology is not well known but they are thought to be mostly confined to remote primary forests, although they may use secondary forests on a seasonal basis (Davies and Birkenhager, 1990; Newing, 2001). Although Jentink’s duiker has been confirmed by direct sightings in Liberia (http://www.edgeofexistence.org) and the Ivory Coast (Newing, 2001), only indirect evidence of its existence has been documented in Sierra Leone (Davies and Birkenhager, 1990, Wilson & Wilson, 1990). All these reports pre-date the 10 years of civil war that Sierra Leone underwent from 1991 to 2001. During this time, the forests of southeast Sierra Leone were used extensively by rebels (Richards, 2005) and since then activities such as mining, slash and burn farming, and illegal logging have recommenced. Given the very limited earlier evidence from a country whose mammal fauna was otherwise well known (Grubb et al., 1998), and these more recent trends, some conservationists have concluded that Jentink’s duiker may well already have been extirpated in Sierra Leone (R. Mittermeier, personal communication). The Gola Forest Programme, a partnership between the Government of Sierra Leone, the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, is working to protect the forest and as part of the research and monitoring programme, camera traps are being used to document animal species found in the forest. We report here the first photographic evidence of Jentink’s duiker in Sierra Leone. Methods The Gola Forest Reserves (710 km 2 ) comprise four blocks located in southeastern Sierra Leone. The reserves are not contiguous, but are divided by the main Freetown- Monrovia highway (between Gola West and East) and areas of community land (between Gola East and North and its extension). The reserves were subjected to com- mercial selective logging in the 1960s to 1980s with the latter period characterised by destructive and unsustain- able offtake. Some parts of the forest, in particular in Gola North, remained largely unlogged. The forest was divided into 5 · 5 km grid squares and a single camera was placed in a square. In all, ten cameras (Reconyx model Rapid Fire RM 45 digital) were deployed in Gola West in July 2008 and ten in Gola East in October 2008, resulting in ten squares being surveyed in each reserve. Cameras were sited next to a stream, river, trail or other area likely to be frequented by animals, and were operational for 4–6 weeks. All cameras were set to high trigger sensitivity, high picture quality, to take up to two pictures per trigger and to wait 30 s before the next trigger. The RM 45 takes colour images in daylight and infrared images when dark, lit with an infrared flash, as it has no white flash. Results and discussion During three events, the cameras recorded one or two individual Jentink’s duikers in Gola West and one individual in Gola East (Fig. 1). The first event, in Gola West (two photos) was on 20 July 2008, 5:16 am (Fig. 2), and the second event (two photos) was on 21 August 2008 at 4:29 am (not shown). It is not possible to tell from the images *Correspondence: E-mail: jessica.ganas@rspb.org.uk Ó 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation Ó 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Afr. J. Ecol. 1