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The Victoria Falls in southern Africa. This is Zambia's biggest tourist attraction, and it's not hard to see why.

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Over 500 million litres of water cascade over their lip every minute, making this one of the world's greatest waterfalls.

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Here, nature is king, with humans relegated to the role of awestruck onlookers.

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But lower down the Zambezi, where the river runs less wildly, it's a different story.

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Here, as in many other parts of the world, man and animals are in constant conflict for food, land and water.

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It's an age-old struggle, but one that has intensified since the trade in wild species became a multi-billion-euro industry.

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It's a new dawn for the Lower Zambezi National Park, a pristine wilderness, a short plane ride from the capital Lusaka.

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Today, the park is teeming with wildlife.

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Hippos wallow in the water, impalas streak along the riverbank, crocodiles bask in the sun, and zebra dart between bushes.

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But it hasn't always been like this. In the late 1970s, there were 100,000 elephants in Zambia.

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A decade later, this figure had been slashed to 10,000 because of rampant poaching for ivory.

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The elephant was almost extinct when the Lower Zambezi National Park was founded in 1983,

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and poaching remained rife throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

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Bouaza Chizoua has been a tourist guide here for 11 years and has witnessed the extraordinary changes the park has undergone.

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As I came here in 1996, we'd been seeing elephants, maybe 50, and they were very, very skittish and aggressive.

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We used to try to approach them charging and doing that, which now is completely different from that time.

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Now you'd stop to a big breeding head of elephant, you'd be watching them for hours, hours and hours,

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which for us is good and that's the sign of showing that poaching has gone down.

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One of the reasons for the dramatic recovery in the local elephant population,

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there are now between 3,000 and 5,000 in the park, was the international ban on the ivory trade that came into force in 1989.

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The ban, which was agreed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES,

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has helped starve poachers of their lucrative market.

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But rules are worthless if they're not properly implemented.

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This is the role of the Zambian Wildlife Authority, ZAWA,

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whose job is to police the country's national parks and regulate the trade in endangered species.

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Today, guards from ZAWA are searching for suspected poachers with the aid of local NGO Conservation Lower Zambezi.

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The report we received was that the gunshots or the suspected poaching activity was somewhere in this area here.

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Sierra One, Sierra One, Line One.

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Line One, Line One, Sierra One.

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This time it's a false alert, but poachers are still...