The comeback of the mountain gorilla

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, a hike to meet the mountain gorillas of Virunga.

0:19It's one of the maddest things I've ever been to. It's a bit like Glastonbury, but if it was in an amazing national park surrounded by volcanoes.

0:33Something that was very kind of striking about this habitat is you kind of have humanity, agricultural fields, buildings, and then it stops and it's the forest. And we were right on the edge of that. The atmosphere, it was one of kind of real excitement. Lots of people were kind of in party mode.

0:52And we just watched this really amazing performance of people dressed as kind of zebras and giraffes and gorillas and that represented different elements of the forest. When Patrick Greenfield, the Guardian's biodiversity reporter, went to visit mountain gorillas in Rwanda, he was expecting the peace of the forest, the silent observation of animals in the wild. Instead, he found himself in the middle of a huge knees-up. We arrived really early in the morning, 5, 6, And even then, the DJs were playing, there was music blasting up into the mountains under this enormous stage that had two mountain gorillas made out of some kind of grass, lots of Rwandan flags and people waving away.

1:41This was Kuita Izina, where thousands of people gather to take part in an annual naming ceremony for baby mountain gorillas. I'm delighted to name a baby girl gorilla, Naharungu, meaning companionship. I'm pleased to name this baby gorilla, Muzehwa, meaning reliable.

2:07The gorillas aren't actually there, but it's a star-studded event, overseen by Rwanda's first lady, where local rangers mingle with royalty, A-list footballers and Hollywood celebrities, each given the honour of naming a baby born in the mountains that year. There was this kind of man that looked like Jesus walking around, and he strides out onto the stage. Our next name is the blockbuster hitmaker, Mr. Michael Bay. Michael Bay, in kind of typical Hollywood fashion, was going on about how he was kind of comparing what we were just in to Super Bowl halftime show. I mean, it really was amazing. I am going to name my baby boy gorilla Murat Muraje, okay, which translates to heritage.

2:53I hear he's like such a good-looking baby gorilla. And being a movie director, I promise I'm going to make him a famous gorilla movie star. OK? And I'm going to give him the nickname.

3:11Underneath the glitz and the pounding music, there is a lot to celebrate. Just a few decades ago, there were only a few hundred mountain gorillas left in the world. Now, thanks to conservationists across three different countries, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, Virunga's gorillas are thriving. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the comeback of the mountain gorillas.

3:46Patrick Greenfield, you have just been to find gorillas in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda and Uganda. How did this incredible journey start? Yes, gosh. So as often, when going to see wild animals, it started really early in the morning. We were kind of rumbling through the villages that are right up on the edge of the National Park. I remember it was about 6am, my head's knocking against the 4x4 as we go through yet another pothole. But it's on the equator, right? So what's incredible about being there is it's dark, it's dark, it's dark, and then the sun rises, and it's light and you start to see those kind of yellows and oranges and reds.

4:24It is so beautiful. What day today? And we just stopped at the kind of foot of the mountain to start walking at this stage and the whole area around us started to light up and it all kind of went this very strange red actually. We were there with a group called the Gorilla Doctors and they're an incredible group of vets I guess really that operate across the entire region giving specialist care to mountain gorillas, making sure that they stay healthy. And so we could be walking for a little bit, we could be walking for a long time, it depends where they are. Depends on how strong we can walk. OK.

5:04First of all, it depends on where they are, but also how strong we can walk. I consider myself someone who likes to exercise. I'm in shape, but this was serious. We got to the bottom of this inactive volcano and the only way was up. Right. Everything starts here. Brilliant. Went through some of the local villages and then that stops and went through this kind of mad, they were calling it a buffalo gate, which was a very tight entrance, a bit like you would get walking in the national parks in Yorkshire or somewhere like that, but it was to stop the buffaloes getting out and the elephants getting out into the forest.

5:40A buffalo can't pass through this. Okay. Yeah. The buffalo gate. And then you were really in with the trees, right? So that was really kind of magical jungle. OK, I'll get a stick and we'll keep going, all right? All right. Once you actually get to the Vrunga mountain range, local scientists call it the islands in the sky. And there's a very hard stop between the kind of world of the humans and the world of everything else. And we were going up. OK. Well, we have to sign the book. Brilliant. An honour. And to get to find the mountain gorillas, you literally needed to climb a mountain. Yes. What was that walk like?

6:24It must have been really quite grueling. There was a group of, I would say, about 15 of us. So we were the scientists, but then there was a group of former poachers who had become guides that were going to kind of take us and find the way to the gorillas where they'd last been spotted. But these animals move over big distances, and we were warned we could be there in 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or you could be spending six hours on the mountain going very high up. How long does it take you if we're not here?

6:57For the doctors, it's a little faster. The camp can take 30 minutes to six hours. Okay. Wow.

7:10And the walk up, I mean, it was just kind of constantly falling over things and trying to keep up with these guys who do this all day, every day. If you're listening to this recording back home, I'm fighting for my life, having to keep up here.

7:30And these vets themselves seem like amazing characters. Yeah, so Dr. Benanti Sebi was our kind of main point of contact with the guerrilla doctors, right? and he is the lead of the team in Uganda. Bernard's a quiet man, right? He's quite reserved, softly spoken. But whenever he did speak, it was so obvious how much he kind of knew about these families. I started tracking this group in 2001. So that is 24 years ago, he was already a silverback. So if he became a silverback at 12 plus 24, at least 35. So I think he's really old. He's older than me. Yeah. he'd been seeing these these animals for years almost all of them had him born i mean he has stories of little baby juveniles that he'd become silverbacks and go on to lead their own family groups he's been at the front line of this for a long time and he is very proud of what they've been able to achieve so you're on your journey towards the gorillas you're pretty certain you're going to find some but in the past it would have been completely different they would have been almost impossible to find what was the gorilla population like 20 or 30 years ago this is one of the most endangered primates in the world and it was only about 200 250 across the entire range because of logging because of expanding our cultural frontiers and mountain gorillas are a subspecies of the eastern gorilla what marks mountain gorillas out is of course where they live right they're they're much higher altitude here where i mean it was above 2000 meters the animals are kind of hairier and can withstand colder environments and are a bit thicker but this is a kind of rich lush gorgeous part of the world that feeds millions and millions of people and mountain gorillas are not hunted for game like antelope or buffalo or whatever it might be but The snares that were being left out in big numbers to trap some of these species were cutting, maiming mountain gorillas, making it really hard for some of them to survive.

9:35This animal, no one really thought, especially in the late 70s and 80s, was going to make it to the early 2000s. And what has saved them? What's pulled them back from the brink of extinction? There's been a huge, huge effort to protect mountain gorillas. There's of course been lots of prominent conservationists to have really kind of invested in veterinary care and habitat protection and making sure some of the drivers of the population losses went. So there's this term in conservation at a paper park, right? So the idea is that you might have a protected area, a national park that you want to look after, but sometimes it's not the resources or it's just impossible because of conflict, whatever it might be, and it's only being protected on paper.

10:18And in Mountain Grida Range, that seemed to be happening right so in Bwindi which is one of the pockets which is a little bit further north in Virunga not far away that until 1991 was essentially just a logging concession right and on the Ugandan side at least in 1991 and there was a law these areas are going to be properly protected as they were meant to be and people were moved off land that was in national park limits compensated but I mean everyone I spoke to recognized people weren't happy about this right they were moved off their farms with their families but it was from this point that especially in Uganda, conservation was going to be taken seriously and an ecotourism model was going to be built up around protecting the areas, benefiting local communities and crucially, helping the mountain gorilla to recover.

11:11So you're on the mountain. Yes. And I've never, and I'm sure most of our listeners have never tried to find gorillas in the wild. So can you tell me how do you go about tracking a gorilla? Sure. So one of the real successes of mountain gorilla conservation is they now have dedicated groups of people that are monitoring where the families are, where they've been moving across this range, across three countries. It's really quite amazing. That is the noise we use to communicate within the groups in case we get a bit far away from each other. And so the trackers that we were with knew where the family were yesterday.

11:54We go to where we left them yesterday. Okay. And then we start tracking. Right. That is the old trail. Then up to where they slept, from where they slept, they will be following our fresh trail, today's trail, up to where they are right now. So we were told that we were going to go and try and find the nests. That's what we were looking for. This is where they passed yesterday. We're going to now follow the trail? Yeah, we are following yesterday's trail. Mountain gorillas typically nest on the ground, and we were looking for big kind of indentations in the grasses, typically, like, normally under a tree, they'd be full of poo.

12:34Kind of gross, right? That's what we were going up the mountain to look for. If we find them taking a certain direction, we track backwards. If they are moving to the north, we'll track to the south. And how did you know that you were getting close to the family of gorillas you were looking for? The closer you get to the gorillas, the more serious it gets. So I remember I think I'd just fallen over for the kind of second or third time. And then they started to spot where the gorillas had been eating, they thought, the previous day. So this is one of the food leftovers. These are peelings of this plant, which is the red hot poker.

13:14The red hot poker? Yeah. What is it called, the red hot poker? Its flower will bring a red colour on the top. The name is derived from, so broke it from this and then ate the inner part. Okay. And sometimes they can even enjoy the insects inside it. I can see this massive kind of handprint in the ground, which has clearly been one of the really big silverbacks. So at this point I wanted to show you the feet. Stepped here and stepped here. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is also for formation. Okay. We are on the right here. How big was the handprint? It was, I mean, much bigger than mine. It was kind of double.

14:00I think you could kind of see the power of it in terms of how this very kind of clumpy, vegetation-filled earth had just been moved very, very easily. And so this big kind of imprint in the grass, Can you tell how big was the gorilla that was here? Probably this was a silverback. Okay. Yeah. It's big. Yeah. When you get closer, it all gets a bit quiet, a bit tense. People start lowering their voices. And now we are using low voices. There is a huge amount of gorilla poo. Absolutely huge amount. You can guess what is in front of us. Can you guess? Silverback. We got to this clearing, no group of trees, and we stopped, and we saw what we'd been looking for.

14:50Yeah, this is the nest where they slept. Ah, this is where they slept? Yeah, this was made yesterday evening. How it is prepared, just look for the vegetation around, make the ground soft, and sometimes they consider the shelter above them, and they sit under it. and it is self-contained. We saw this big clump. I guess like, I don't know, if you were out in the park in summer in the UK and the grass is a bit long and you lie there for a couple of hours and you get up and you've got the kind of body imprint, right? But this was a big imprint. That was the key moment where you thought, OK, we're close now.

15:37They're truckers. We are close to them. and we normally leave our walking sticks behind.

15:55Tell us how many of these mountain gorillas there are currently living in Virunga National Park. So in Virunga, there are about 500, 600 now. They're only found in two places on the planet, right, that are close together in Virunga and Gwindi. and together there's over a thousand right which is a kind of key I think and that's globally globally right so psychologically that was a real big thing for people who've been working so hard on the conservation of these animals that led to one of the key conservation organizations the IUCN to reclassify them right no longer as critically endangered just endangered I say but that was huge and they were really excited it's clearly going to go up again and there's real momentum now it's quite I mean down to 250 and now to over a thousand gorillas that's that's an amazing recovery in a really short amount of time isn't it and you've told us about setting up these national parks to give these gorillas the chance of their population to recover but tell me a bit more about the people who have actually been driving this work as well the people you were with on this journey sure so when gorilla doctors were formed the key threats to mountain gorillas in this area were snares and traps and things left out in the forest that were just kind of constantly damaging these primates right and you would there are horrible photos of the slashes and cuts on the hand and infections and all these kind of things that mountain grillers were kind of typically suffering with but now i mean you've got groups of i mean 12 13 14 people across these ranges who quickly intervene really brilliant health care within the forest for these animals and they're having a really big impact so i think it's about half of the population increase in the Wurunga range can be attributed to these groups.

17:36I mean, it's brilliant conservation work. Wow. And they're stopping gorillas that are almost certainly going to die from dying. And I mean, it can't have been easy to do this. This is an area where there's a lot of instability, conflict, poverty. There's a lot of different issues at play. So what kind of risks have the people who've been trying to save the gorillas face themselves? Sure. So one of the odd things to kind of get your head around is that you're in this kind of real safe eco-tourism bubble on the Ugandan Rwandan sides, definitely, right? But you can see just over the other side of the mountains into the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, in that area, guerrilla territory, part of Runga National Park, which is what it's called on the DRC side.

18:20But that's controlled by M23 rebels, right? It's part of the ongoing conflict in the Kivu regions of the Congo that's kind of been going on and on now for years and years and years. Really, really violent conflict. But this is, if not the, one of the most dangerous jobs in conservation. To be a ranger, patrolling these forests, people die every year. It's over 200 people now in Virunga alone and on the DRC side that have died. People have been killed for a variety of reasons, stumbling across armed groups, poachers, whatever it might be in the forest. They're putting their lives at risk every day to protect that section of mountain grid habitat.

18:57So this is really risky work that these rangers and vets are doing, but obviously really effective as well if it's one of the main reasons that this population has been able to bounce back. But I guess if Rwanda's putting on these star-studded naming ceremonies, it's also become a pretty lucrative tourism venture too? Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to go and spend an hour with a guerrilla family in Uganda, on the Ugandan side, you're not a local, you're spending$800, right? Huge amount of money. On the Rwandan side, it's even more, it's$1 ,500. And they've got a real kind of luxury, everyone's very proud of this.

19:34There's one place you can stay for$20 ,000 a night. And I think that's where all the kind of Hollywood celebrities go. But then on the DRC side, you've got none of that, right? And there's only just over the way. And I think in lulls and the fighting, some tourists risk it and pay locals for a couple of hundred dollars. But people have died doing that, right? The contrasts now are really, really mad. There is that tension, though, isn't there? Humans were obviously the reason that these guerrilla populations declined in the first place. What impact is it having on the guerrillas having more interaction with humans?

20:10So almost anybody who's going to see a mountain gorilla will see a habituated mountain gorilla. So that really just means that it's used to spending time around humans. And it takes about a year or two for this process to really play out, right? So I think initially someone on their own has to go and kind of stand near a group of mountain gorillas 50 metres away and hope they don't run. And that builds up and up and up over kind of weeks, months. Hopefully that's volunteer based. Yeah, right. And you kind of have to hope they don't come and attack you. But I mean, over time they get used to you and then you can get a bit closer.

20:46And that eventually becomes an opportunity for people to get really close to the grillers and for tourists to go see them. And it's very unlikely they attack. I mean, they'll tolerate us. But that's been key to financial success, right? If we can't get near them, people won't pay money to see them. And that virtuous cycle doesn't work anymore. And what about the risk, the kind of health risks to the gorillas? Now, I guess it's humans that are a big threat. I'm bringing diseases from the UK and you've got people from all over the world who are bringing their own versions of kind of flu and because their primates can easily jump over, right?

21:23Because they are seeing more mountain gorillas now getting illnesses that the gorilla doctors were saying they just weren't getting at all 20, 30 years ago. Oh, wow. Coming up, Patrick meets the gorillas.

21:47So, can you tell us about the moment that you finally saw the gorillas for yourself? It was a very funny moment because we were getting the kind of safety briefing and about not getting very close.

22:27And I'd not kind of realised how close we actually were. and the leader of our group who was kind of talking through this started to get a bit distracted and I noticed there was a mountain gorilla kind of really, really close to him. But that... Is that a gorilla? Yeah. That noise? Yeah. It is from him. The silverback? Yeah. So how far away was the gorilla to you? I'd say probably about 10 metres at this stage. Wow. So one of the individuals is right there. You can see him. I haven't seen all the features, but on the head, normally the silverback will have that crest you're seeing. He had his back turned, kind of gave us a few glances, kind of looked over his shoulder and was, oh God, their back maybe, I don't know what he was thinking.

23:17But he was munching away on thistles, gorillas love thistles, which I, romantic gorillas do, and he was kind of picking them off and stuffing them in his mouth. who is the dominant silverback in the group who lead the other silverbacks. They have to be under his command. And then, I don't know, a few footsteps away, there was the blackback whose nest would clearly sit in earlier, and he was really noisily just kind of pulling these brambles down as loud as he could, stuffing leaves in his mouth as he was going.

23:53OK. Further up? Yeah, we'll get her over there. A member of the family I love the most seeing was seeing the juvenile. This group had four silverbacks. I mean, the doctors themselves had some quite funny attitudes about it because they want females, right? That's how you get the population to grow. In this family, they're a bit like, oh, there's too many blokes here. So you have the dominant silverback and three others, and there's a black back who's on his way to become it. So there'll be five silverbacks relatively soon. And they're just kind of there. It's a bit like your dad eating his dinner or something kind of thing like serious serious thing and then there's this juvenile should be eating not taking it seriously swinging around mum's kind of nearby trying to be encouraging and it still sounds very familiar yeah it's it's yeah as you said familiar scene to many people i imagine and um but very cute very very cute oh my god so now we can see a female You can, okay, so the silverbacks, you can hear them crashing around really noisily.

24:58But the females are really delicately eating, picking through vines here. It must have just been the most extraordinary thing to see. It was surreal, really. So you can spot where there, one here, one here, where you see the vegetation.

25:16And another line is there, so you see how they spread at that. Wow.