Woodland defines Bafing. Where much of this latitude is open savanna sliding toward desert, the park keeps a denser cover of trees, and that cover is what allows chimpanzees to survive here at all. These are western chimpanzees, a critically endangered subspecies, and the Manding Plateau marks something close to the northern limit of their range on the continent. A chimpanzee on the edge of the Sahel lives a harder life than one in the rainforests to the south, ranging farther for fruit and water, adapting to a landscape that gives less. Protecting them means protecting the woodland itself, which is exactly what the park was created to do.

Bafing belongs to a larger conservation idea. Together with the Kouroufing and Wongo National Park areas, it forms the components of the Bafing Biosphere, a network meant to safeguard a whole working ecosystem rather than a single fenced patch. The Bafing River threads through it all, the same black river that, far downstream at Bafoulabé, joins the Bakoy to become the Sénégal. Here, near its headwaters, the river sustains the woodland and the creatures in it through the long Sahelian dry season. The park's terrain of rolling wooded country and watercourses is both refuge and corridor, a place where animals can move and persist.

BirdLife International has named Bafing an Important Bird Area, and the roll call of species explains why. Violet turacos flash crimson under their wings as they break from the canopy. Blue-bellied rollers turn somersaults in the air. Fox kestrels hang on the wind, and Senegal parrots cross the woodland in noisy green bands. Among the trees move bronze-tailed starlings, white-crowned robin-chats, and white-fronted black-chats, while Mali and black-faced firefinches and grey-headed olivebacks pick through the understory. For a region better known for its harsh climate than its wildlife, this concentration of color and life is its own kind of quiet marvel, sustained by the woodland the chimpanzees also need.