High up in the mountainous rainforests of southeastern Nigeria, a joyous shriek reverberated from one of the area’s many caves. Its echo traced back to Iroro Tanshi, whose trembling hands cupped a tiny flitting form that no one was certain even lived in the country.
From unmitigated joy to gut-wrenching loss, shame to satisfaction, Tanshi has experienced all manner of emotions on her winding road to last month receiving the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize — an annual award recognizing global environmental leaders.
Yet even 10 years on from venturing into Cross River State’s Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and finding the short-tailed roundleaf bat — a species previously not confirmed to live in Nigeria and rarely sighted in its known range of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea — the conservation ecologist still struggles to articulate the uniquely bittersweet feeling of the discovery.
“There is a loss that comes from just knowing that you can’t truly communicate how you’re feeling about something to somebody else,” Tanshi, 41, told CNN.
“In my case, I had local assistants who weren’t formally trained … the only thing I said to them was, ‘Our lives are about to change.’”
Weighing little more than a US nickel at roughly 7 grams, the big-eared, button-nosed bat joins numerous other animals native to the 24,700-acre sanctuary in occupying an unwanted place on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of extinction-threatened species.
With an estimated global population of under 1,500, they are classified as endangered. Yet unlike the drill monkeys, chimpanzees and critically endangered Cross River gorillas that also inhabit Nigeria’s largest remaining rainforest region, many in Nigeria and beyond may care little for their plight.
Despite their status as the world’s only mammal capable of powered flight and their critical ecological roles as seed spreaders and pollinators, bats have long faced a reputational battle. Historic associations with vampires and the supernatural in Western folklore have been compounded by links to the emergence of Covid-19, leading many to associate them with evil, darkness and disease.
Though generally perceived more positively in Eastern culture, with China celebrating them as symbols of luck and happiness, bats endure a “complicated” relationship in Nigeria, where Tanshi says they are regularly associated with witchcraft and eaten in some areas.
Exceptions exist, like in Benin City, where bats are considered to bring “good juju” (good omens) because they supposedly cannot be contaminated by poison, explained Tanshi. Yet the fact this has a scientific explanation, the habit of fruit bats to spit out the fibrous pulp of consumed fruit, only adds to her exasperation that bats aren’t generally embraced for their many “cool” attributes.
“It’s all these layers of frustration,” she said. “Sometimes it’s sadness, sometimes it’s a combination of laughter and, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to sit you down for this. We’ve got to have a conversation.’”
The uncovering of the short-tailed roundleaf bat roost was a scarcely believable early win for the Small Mammal Conservation Organization (SMACON), co-founded by Tanshi shortly prior to the expedition in 2016. Yet there was barely time to savor the moment.
Just a fortnight later, Tanshi — moist cloth plastered across her mouth to help her breathe — led her team scampering down the mountain away from their burning campsite as an enormous wildfire ripped through the trees. When rainfall finally extinguished the flames three weeks later, roughly half of the forest had gone up in smoke.
So too had many of Tanshi’s hopes, from protecting a critical habitat, to her doctoral research, or simply showing her discovery to the world.
“How do you tell people that perhaps one of the only known — we wouldn’t know if we were going to find it anywhere else — populations of this species’ habitats was on fire?” she said. “There’s some kind of shame and loss.”
It is a pain that still lingers a decade on, even after the bats have been documented in the area every year since. Yet from the ashes rose a program that has been instrumental in preventing repeat incidents of a similar scale. Launched by Tanshi and SMACON in 2017, the Zero Wildfire Campaign has helped five communities in the area to lead wildfire-prevention efforts in their own villages.
Having grown up oblivious to forest fires in the cosmopolitan oil city of Warri, located in the country’s southerly Niger Delta region, Tanshi was determined to educate herself about wildfires following her close encounter. After extensive research in the US, she took inspiration from colored sign monitoring systems and remote firefighting backpacks used across the Western states.
Armed with new techniques and knowledge, Tanshi began working with Cross River State communities, who had been using intentional burns as part of farming and land-clearing techniques for decades. Wildfires began when these fires escalated uncontrollably, Tanshi found, but her team had no intention of telling people to never use burns again.
Locals had refined their ability to read the environment to inform controlled burn practices over generations. The issue was that climate change and subsequent erratic rainfall patterns had spoiled their intuitive knowledge, leading them to burn at the wrong times — with disastrous consequences.
“There’s a critical point where there’s just enough moisture on the forest floor, in the soil, that allows your fires to proceed really slowly, at low intensity,” Tanshi explained.
“March used to be a good time … (But) Their local, traditional data points no longer fit current realities. One lady said, ‘Just tell us the best time to burn. The weather has changed.’ She was talking about climate change, without using the formal scientific term.”
As such, Tanshi saw her role more as translator than guide, as her team engaged in town hall meetings and sociological research to provide communities with the resources they needed to regulate wildfires.
Weather stations — capable of monitoring temperature, humidity and wind data — installed in the five communities became the hubs for a fire risk model that farmers were trained to interpret. Daily assessments were communicated via colored-coded signposts, with “town criers” sent out to announce no-burning notices on red days.
On such high-risk days, the community’s own “forest guardians,” SMACON-trained and equipped with water backpacks, patrolled vulnerable areas by foot and motorcycle. Meanwhile, education programs taught local children about bat conservation and wildfire prevention.
All aspects have combined to prevent 74 potentially unmanageable blazes from escalating between 2022 and 2025, securing the crops and livelihoods of approximately 27,000 people in 16 communities surrounding the sanctuary, according to the Goldman Prize.
Though her award, presented at a glitzy San Francisco ceremony, was a pinch-me moment for Tanshi, one of the most rewarding aspects of it all may be yet to come. Plans are in motion to roll out wildfire programs and take the battle against deforestation across Nigeria and beyond, with discussions taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia and Madagascar.
However far the project goes, Tanshi will cherish the memory of walking through one of the first villages to make a change and being thanked by a local cocoa farmer courtesy of a simple four-word statement: “You saved my farm.”
“You’re thinking, ‘Well, I was actually trying to save the bats.’ But now I see that because we took your solutions that were very much about saving your livelihood, now we get to celebrate that opportunity of being able to save your livelihood with you,” she said.
“That’s the rewarding part, that we can bring change to both bats and local people, to forests and local people, to climate and local people … Wherever people are, you can take a stand to make a change.”