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Gorillas on the Brink: An Eye-Opening Trip to Uganda
Blog post by Global Explorers Board Member Matt Kareus; photos by Maggie Kareus.
Last November my wife and I had the opportunity to go to Uganda for a couple of weeks. We visited a few different national parks and towards the end of our visit we went trekking to see mountain gorillas in Bwindi Forest National Park, something we both had dreamed of doing for a long time.
It is not uncommon for a gorilla trek to last the better part of the day and it can be tough going, as the gorillas are constantly on the move up and down the steep, heavily forested hillsides. Fortunately, it took us only about an hour to come upon them. Though I’d seen plenty of documentaries about mountain gorillas over the years, I was not prepared for the wave of emotion and excitement that swept over me when we caught our first glimpse of that unmistakable dark black fur against the lush green backdrop of the forest.
Gorillas are of course huge and incredibly powerful animals; being near them in the wild is a humbling and intimidating experience. But during the hour we spent sitting with them they couldn’t have been more hospitable as we watched them climb trees, groom each other and lay around in the grass. A recent mother seemed to enjoy showing off her baby, who couldn’t take her eyes off of us. At one point, the silverback (the dominant male in the group) got angry with a juvenile and jumped on him and seemed to bite him on the ear, which provoked a blood curdling scream. Otherwise, it was remarkably peaceful and everyone in our group was awed as we began our march out of the forest.
According to World Wildlife Fund there are only about 786 mountain gorillas left in the wild. That’s about one mountain gorilla for every nine million humans. You could fit them all in an Airbus A380 (though I wouldn’t recommend it). They are critically endangered and face extinction from a variety of threats including habitat loss, war, poaching and disease. At Bwindi, we saw for ourselves how the forest has been cleared right up to the park boundary to make way for subsistence agriculture. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that within the next few decades Uganda will have the highest population growth rate in the world and that by 2050 its population will soar from 27 million to 130 million. It’s hard to imagine how mountain gorillas will survive in this scenario. But it’s even harder to imagine a world without them.
