Trekking With the Gorillas of Rwanda

Posted by Jeff on Oct 26, 2015 @ 9:17 am in Hiking News | 0 comments | Last modified: October 26, 2015

One second you are bushwhacking through thickets of bamboo in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, pulling yourself up a steep lava slope, toehold to toehold. The next, you turn a corner and sunlight streams through the canopy to illuminate a matted clump of black against a curtain of rain forest green. You’ve known this was coming and still you gasp. Seated perhaps 30 feet away is one of the roughly 900 mountain gorillas remaining on earth, a saggy-breasted female, and soon you see that she is cradling an infant in her lap. She wraps one arm around the 6-month-old while scratching her own ear with an extended index finger.

She is the advanced sentry for the Hirwa family, a clan of 20, and to the extent that she seems to care at all about our arrival, her attitude smacks of “What took you so long?”

Any anthropomorphism must be forgiven; it is impossible not to be struck by the humanoid nature of these neighbors on the evolutionary chain. While observing so much of African wildlife — warthogs, elephants, giraffes — one marvels at their prehistoric form and questions our placement in the same biological class. With the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, which share 98 percent of our DNA, we are looking into a mirror, and they are looking impassively back.

Thirty-five years ago, the Virunga population had been thinned by poaching, disease and habitat loss to an extremely endangered 250. Conservation efforts have brought the count gradually back to 480, with about 300 of those on the mountainsides of Volcanoes National Park. There were 31 births there from June 2014 to August 2015 (after a gestation, not surprisingly, of about nine months).

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