Nki's path to protection was neither smooth nor simple. In 1995, the area received its first official designation as an Essential Protection Zone. But formal national park status did not arrive until October 17, 2005, when the Cameroonian government decreed the creation of both Boumba Bek and Nki National Parks. That decree was contested from the start. The Baka people, who have lived in these forests for generations, continually challenged the park's boundaries and demanded higher usage rights over land they considered their own. Leonard Usongo, who managed WWF projects in southeastern Cameroon, captured the fundamental tension when he observed that conservation cannot succeed without acknowledging the problems and poverty of the communities it displaces. The park straddles two administrative divisions in the East Province, Ngoyla in Haut Nyon and Moloundou in Boumba et Ngoko, and the roughly 22,900 people living in the surrounding area are mostly ethnic Bantu and Baka communities, along with employees of logging companies and traders.

The Dja River crosses through Nki, and the park sits within the broader Sangha ecoregion. Seventy-three bais have been discovered across the park's extent, each one a natural opening in the canopy where mineral-rich soils and water draw animals into the open. Ikwa Bai, the largest, has a small creek running through its center over a bed of rocks and sand, with a mineral pit beside the stream. The forest surrounding these clearings is predominantly semi-evergreen, with an open canopy dominated by Triplochiton trees reaching 50 to 60 meters in height. Seasonally flooded Uapaca trees line the banks of the Dja River. The climate is equatorial, with temperatures averaging 24 degrees Celsius and humidity swinging between 60 and 90 percent. Rainfall reaches 1,500 millimeters annually, distributed across two rainy seasons and two dry spells that give the forest its rhythm.

An estimated 6,000 adult gorillas live within Nki, making it one of the most significant refuges for the species in Central Africa. Forest elephant populations have risen steadily, from 1,547 in 1998 to approximately 3,000 by 2006, with a combined density of roughly 2.5 elephants per square kilometer across Nki and neighboring Boumba Bek. The park shelters sitatunga, bongos, giant forest hogs, leopards, Nile crocodiles, and hundreds of fish species. A 20-day BirdLife International survey documented 265 bird species, including a discovery that intrigued ornithologists: a pair of the rare Dja River scrub warblers nesting in a tiny one-hectare patch of marsh. Even more tantalizing, three species of forest nightjar have been recorded in the park. Bate's and brown nightjars are common enough in southeastern Cameroon, but a third, unidentified species has been heard calling on two occasions. Its voice matches the only known specimen of Prigogine's nightjar, a bird so rare it was previously documented from a single individual found in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nki's remoteness has preserved it, but remoteness is a double-edged condition. The nearest towns, Yokadouma, Moloundou, and Lomie, are themselves at the edge of Cameroon's developed infrastructure. The population density around the park is roughly five people per square kilometer, concentrated along the main Yokadouma-Moloundou road. Villages are mostly homogeneous, with few outsiders beyond civil servants and traders. This isolation has kept the forest pristine but has also made enforcement difficult and community engagement complicated. The Baka and Bantu communities who live along the park's margins depend on the forest in ways that a line on a map cannot simply override, and conservation here requires navigating the gap between ecological ideals and the daily realities of life on the forest edge.

Two small owls, Sjostedt's and the African barred owlet, coexist within Nki despite having nearly identical habitat requirements, a quiet demonstration of the ecological complexity packed into this forest. The park's diurnal primates include the threatened crested monkey, De Brazza's monkey, and the black colobus, which reportedly lives only east of the Dja River. Each species occupies a niche refined over millennia in a forest that has never been logged on any significant scale. Nki is not a park that overwhelms with spectacle. It reveals itself slowly, in the call of an unidentified nightjar at dusk, in the mineral-stained water of a bai creek, in the fact that parts of this forest remain inaccessible and unexplored. Its value lies not in what has been discovered but in what remains to be found.