Two decades ago, this patch of Malawian forest was almost emptied of wildlife. The last elephants had been poached. The lions had been caught in snare traps. Other species died off as their range was diced by machete-wielding farmers.

Now the animals have returned in a modern-day Noah’s ark — a bold attempt by private philanthropists and environmentalists to move wildlife from other parts of the continent.

Hundreds of miles from this dense forest, the animals were scooped up in harnesses dangling from construction cranes. They were carried into white metal storage containers, with the occasional elephant trunk peeking out. Then they crisscrossed southern Africa in commercial planes and flatbed trucks.

By almost any measure, Africa’s wildlife has suffered immensely in recent decades. Over 90 percent of the continent’s elephants have vanished over the last century. The lion population has crashed by more than 40 percentsince 1993. There are fewer than 1,000 mountain gorillas in the wild. There are only two northern white rhinos in existence.

Clockwise from top: Crews load lions onto a truck in Majete Wildlife Reserve in February. Chimwala sleeps in his crate before his journey to Liwonde National Park. Sedated lions Chimwala and Sapitwa receive IV fluids before being transported from Majete Wildlife Reserve.

African Parks, the nonprofit organization that arranges the shipments of the animals, aims to restore populations that once existed in some of the world’s most remote places. It has trucked520 elephants across Malawi. It flew 20 black rhinos from South Africa to Rwanda. This month, it started bringing rhinos back to Chad, where they were wiped out three decades ago.

And in southern Malawi, on a recent overcast morning, Craig Reid dragged the carcass of a gazelle across a grassy enclosure in Liwonde National Park, north of Majete. Three cheetahs growled at him from about a foot away, showing their teeth.

“Craig, what are you doing?” Reid’s wife, Andrea, asked nervously, as the cheetahs inched closer.

Two weeks later, the enclosure would be filled with imported lions, the next set of animals in shipping crates, part of an experiment in turning back the clock to a time of greater biodiversity. After that, rhinos were expected.

Tim Meko/The Washington Post

African Parks isn’t the first organization to translocate wildlife, a practice that is decades old and brought gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park from Canada in the 1990s, and reintroduced the giant pandas to China in 2011.

Other groups have moved animals across the continent, but the organization is the first to do it on such a large scale — while managing parks in some of the most violence-plagued countries in Africa. It operates Chinko National Park in the Central African Republic, where a conflict has left thousands dead and forced displaced families into the wildlife refuge. It runs Garamba National Park in Congo, a nation scarred by a brutal civil war. Last year, four of the park’s rangers were murdered by poachers, who hack off elephant tusks that can fetch $1,000 a pound in the ivory market in China.

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