Gorillas

Here's the first in my posts about our vacation with Isaac in Goma, Virunga Park, Bukavu, and Kahuzi-Biéga Park, all in the eastern part of the DRC. I'm posting some of our more interesting gorilla pictures. We visited two different families of mountain gorillas in Virunga, one family of eastern lowland gorillas in Kahuzi-Biéga, and we visited the gorilla orphanage at the Mikeno Lodge in Virunga Park. Mountain gorillas and eastern lowland gorillas are both sub-species of eastern gorillas and very endangered by poaching and habitat destruction.

Big daddy silverback watching over his family.

Perfect silverback posture.

This map gives a general idea about the location of the parks.

Mountain gorilla visits are available in the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. I really wanted to support eco-tourism in the Congo, and when we heard that the security situation had improved, I worked with a guide company to plan a wonderful trip. Visiting a gorilla family works like this: mountain gorillas are herbivores and live in families headed by a dominant male (silverback). Besides the adult females and the juveniles, larger families may also have one or two subordinate silverbacks and possibly other blackback males, but the male : female ratio for adults is always heavily skewed – 4 or 5 times as many adult females as males, for example.
Certain mountain gorilla families have been "habituated" by park rangers over time so they are not threatened by human visitors. About 6 families are habituated in Virunga out of 20 or so. The park leaves many families alone; during the war the habituated families were more readily victims of poaching.
The park guides visit the gorilla families every day, either with or without tourists. Before our park vehicle arrives at the closest access point to the forest, the guides have located the nesting site from the night before and we hike into the bush following the guides as they track the gorilla family. Once the family is located, humans are required to stay 7 meters away and wear masks to try and reduce human-to-gorilla disease transfer. At that point, the rangers start the timer and you get an hour to watch the gorillas.

This doesn't look like 7 meters!

For our first visit, an excellent park driver picked us up in the morning at our hotel in Goma and drove us into the park, where we started hiking with a ranger. When we reached the large family (we think it was the Bageni family), the adults were mostly resting, but the juveniles were playing.

I didn't realize Ewoks looked like gorillas.

There were 1000s of flies around and you can see them in every picture, but they didn't seem to be interested in either the gorillas or the humans. Perhaps they feasted on the bruised leaves.

Flies

Long arms scratch better

Our second visit was to the smaller Humba family. The families are named after the dominant silverback, and even this smaller family had a subordinant silverback. We walked directly from the Bukima tented camp in Virunga into the forest, following the guides. The guides knew where the gorillas had slept the night before, but it took some tracking to find them again. The family was actively feeding on leaves and bamboo and was moving around a lot more than the Bageni family because we found them earlier in the day. We followed after them and the guides tried to get us better views of Silverback Humba, but he wasn't too happy about it. We ended up having a close encounter with the subordinate silverback who seemed very big, but very gentle, when he walked close enough to brush against Isaac. [Karen: We were actually a little disturbed at the guides' insistence on following the silverbacks; we didn't want to harass them, and thought the others were just as interesting.]

Silverback approaching Isaac

We also visited the gorilla orphanage at Mikeno Lodge in the Virunga Park. They had about six young mountain gorillas, and a single eastern lowland gorilla in a separate enclosure. Only one of hte mountain gorillas was still bottle feeding.

At the orphanage.

The Kahuzi-Biéga Park is outside of Bukavu, and Isaac and I visited a family of eastern lowland gorillas. Karen was incapacitated after hiking the Nyiragongo volcano. [Karen: "incapacitated" in quotation marks ... my legs were sore, but I was also grateful for a day to catch up on work and to use the hotel's fast internet connection.] We reached their forest after crossing a tea plantation.

I want a world where fascinating, magnificent animals like these thrive. I am so lucky to have been able to see them in their natural habitat. I really want to see the Virunga documentary (nominated for an Oscar this year) when I return to the States.

Eye contact.

What do you think?