In the pristine wilderness of Gabon are the majestic and gentle Western Lowland Gorillas. A firsthand report from our travel writer on what goes into habituating them.
Sitting still in the forest with my tracker, we were awaiting the arrival of western low- land gorillas on their morning forage. And then, suddenly, as if on cue, they did, slowly but surely. In the thick ar- rowroot bush undergrowth, I noticed a juvenile western lowland gorilla staring at me through the verdant leaves. Soon, I was surrounded by juveniles, sub-adults and mothers watching me curiously. A baby gorilla and her sibling came almost 10ft from me at which time we had to hurriedly move away to keep a healthy distance – so as not to expose them to airborne human viruses. That moment still lives in me.
I am recollecting this experience from about a decade ago when visiting the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of the Congo (ROC), also known as Congo-Brazzaville, where Dr Magdalena Bermejo, a Spanish primatologist, first habituated the western lowland gorillas in the early 1990s. Like the habituation of mountain gorillas at the Bwindi National Park in southwestern Uganda in 1991, enacting the same process for their western cousins had been a remarkable achievement.
The habituation of wild gorillas – the process of getting them to ignore the presence of humans, or be used to seeing and being around humans – has long proven to be a useful tool for research and conservation programs. It generates revenue for sustainable tourism for local communities, ends the practice of bushmeat hunting, enables detailed research on feeding ecology and social behavior in addition to protecting the forests where they live.
Mountain gorillas are large apes with long dark hair and an average weight of 440 pounds. They are to be found in mountainous areas, at elevations from 8,000ft to 13,000ft, in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); and they have adapted to freezing temperatures. Lowland gorillas, much smaller and weighing an average of 330 pounds, live in the equatorial rainforests in much warmer environments, and forage for food on adjacent swamp lands and savannah grasslands. They inhabit the countries of Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the ROC and the Central African Republic (CAR).
Loading...
During my Odzala trip in 2015, I was completely enamored by these gentle creatures and spent several hours watching them go about their daily lives. Over dinner once with Dr Bermejo, I learned about the difficulties and expenses of habituation, including the dangers of exposing human-borne viruses to these apes.
She said her biggest shock came when over 5,000 gorillas – including the nearly 200 animals her research group was observing – died during an Ebola outbreak in the ROC. She shared with me the research videos, captured using camera traps, of their social behavior.
In my quest to see these gorillas again, I traveled to Gabon in 2018. The country has the largest population of these animals inhabiting the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest rainforest area after the Amazon. This second visit to see habituated gorillas took me to the Loango National Park where scientists from the Max Planck Institute from Leipzig, Germany, had begun their research since 2016.
With my interest peaking after visiting Gabon, I met Spanish conservationist Antonio Anoro, whose NGO, Gabon Untouched, has been developing eco-tourism in the country. For over a decade, Anoro has played a key role in bringing tourism to the remote Moukalaba-Doudou National Park, home to the one of highest numbers of western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees.
Gabon Untouched, in collaboration with Dr Etienne François Akomo-Okoue of IRET (Institut de Recherche en Ecologie Tropicale), have managed to protect a
17-member gorilla group – originally habituated by scientists from Kyoto University, Japan, in 2005 – for the sake of research, tourism and community development.
After yet another visit to Gabon in 2019, Anoro invited me to join his NGO as an advisor, thereby giving me an opportunity to help and also get a firsthand look at gorilla conservation and sustainable tourism development.
In 2023, Gabon Untouched and IRET launched a new program to habituate another group of gorillas. They selected an area on the perimeter of the Moukalaba-Dou- dou National Park, where intense ape activity had been noticed by villagers. Using scientific parameters proven by apex species surveys, camera traps were set up in three transects running over 2kms into the forest. Within weeks, the images of gorillas and chimpanzees approaching a nearby stream were recorded and a suitable site selected for the habituation process.
The habituation of gorillas in the tropical forests of Central Africa requires high-tracking skills prior to making the decision of which group to follow. As studies show, it is important to employ the same trackers to continue searching for gorillas in the forest – to increase their tracking skills and techniques. These abilities include finding the trails of gorillas from field signs (feces, footprint, food scraps), identifying the vocalization of gorillas and using the aforementioned techniques to locate them.
Accumulated experience in the forest and the ability to predict their location daily helps to follow trails of gorillas reliably and consistently.
Experience has shown that it takes four trackers, spending an average of nine hours per day in the presence of these animals, for habituation to take effect. Two to three years of such efforts, often accompanied by researchers, accelerate the habituation process. Silver- backs, the leaders of a gorilla family of up to 20 members, become semi-habituated within a year of regular contact. Historically, habituating females takes longer than males, and like the males, they start with avoidance, aggression and curiosity before habituation.
On my last trip to Gabon last year, I met Rodrigue Nzou, one of the leaders of community eco-tourism organization Papa Yitu in the Punu village of Doussala, at the edge of the Moukalaba-Doudou National Park.
Nzou told me: “Conservation has changed the way villagers look at wildlife. The employment from research and eco-tourism activities has stopped the hunting for bushmeat.”
It has been a tradition among the Punu people to call the silverback gorilla ‘Papa’ (chief in French). The name ‘Yitu’ means ‘hope’ in their language. As the head of Papa Yitu (hope for the gorillas), Nzou works closely with Gabon Untouched. Gabon, which is 90% forested and often called the Last Eden, is home to nearly 30,000 western lowland gorillas – that’s 25% of its estimated total population. Their protection also keeps the planet green by saving the forests where they live.
Loading...