The Last Silverback Mountain Gorillas

[MUSIC PLAYING] LEVI: My name is Levi. And I am one of the guides in the Impenetrable Forest. Now this here Bwindi Forest is the forest very special for being a home to critically endangered mountain gorillas. Yeah, we are going to start the gorilla tracking journey. And which will take us possibly the whole day into the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, an island within the communities. When you look at the map of Africa, you get Uganda, then bordering Congo, DRC, that is the location of Bwindi. We started in an open place, and you can see here where we are going, this is a primary forest now. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Mountain gorillas only exist on that patch of habitat in the mountains of the Virungas. And they only exist in those three countries, in just a real small area. They're not in zoos. The zoo population of gorillas are western lowland gorillas, for the most part. So this is it. Their whole survival rests in this patch of habitat that's really isolated on these mountaintops. And there's only 720 of them that exist in the world. And they're all in this area And it's surrounded by a sea of humans. LEVI: These mountain gorillas, they are the great apes. Human beings are also the great apes. The behaviors, the way they behave when you look at them, it's very, very marvelous. They behave like people, like human beings. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: The first time that you see a gorilla through that veil of vegetation, and he's looking at you, and you look at him, and you catch him in the eye, and it's really clear that there's a species connection. We share a good part of our genes, and you can see so much of human behavior reflected or derived from behavior of some of the great apes. LEVI: Mountain Gorillas are 99% vegetarians. Most of the food they eat is leaves, bark of trees, and fruits. But 1% to make 100% of their food is the ants. So they change that diet by eating ants, actually to get proteins. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Opening up the forest with coffee plantations and logging companies from Yugoslavia and the French to Spanish to Dutch, when they came in to get that very valuable hardwood out of the forest. And of course, they're bringing labor from around the country. So the population demographics changed drastically. So it's a very dense human population with agriculture bordering right up to the parks. LEVI: Lifespan of these mountain gorillas is 50 years, here in the wild. But when the people started settling around, then they started clearing their habitat for farming. And also killing them. Then they started becoming very few. Their numbers started reducing. Bwindi has about half of the world's population, which is about 340. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Bushmeat refers to the capture and killing of wild game for commercial purposes. They set snares on wildlife trails that are totally indiscriminate. And even gorillas get caught in them. It'll tighten around its hand or foot, and the hand will atrophy. So there's a lot of mutilation and mortality from these snares that are ubiquitous around the forest. And so the real threats right now are human population growth, it's the main threat. Insecurity. This area has been an area of political instability for a long time. In all three countries, there's been national conflicts and regional conflicts. Uganda went through years of the most horrible dictatorship under Idi Amin, where wildlife populations were decimated throughout the country. Rwanda went through a genocide. DRC has been at war since 1993 and before. Millions of people died in those wars. Millions of people displaced. It goes on to right now. LEVI: OK, this side where we are overlooking is Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. And as you go to the slope, on this side is DRC. And where you see across, you see the bananas, that's the village on the Uganda side. But if you go beyond, then you are in the DRC. [MUSIC PLAYING] LEVI: When we get to the gorillas, we will have a sound that we make. We imitate their vocalization so that they come down, they know we are friendly, we have no problem to them. And that's Sowendi That vocalization is [GROWLING ]. Like cause they also communicate. They live with families, headed by silverbacks. And having only one dominant silverback, only one lead male, who leads the whole family. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: The first time I saw mountain gorillas was in the Bwindi National Park in Uganda. And when we got up there, the silverback gave us a really great sideways sort of false charge to let us know that he was the boss. Interestingly, that silverback was missing a hand from a snare wound. What you need to do when you're around gorillas is do everything you can do to look submissive. Slowly go down to the ground, pretend like you're feeding on leaves, and sort of act like a monkey, which comes sort of naturally to some of us anyways. But running is the wrong thing. LEVI: If one dominant silverback start getting weak-- he's very weak, he cannot protect the family-- he leaves the powers to the youngest, who is very strong enough to defend the family. But sometime they can fight. We don't have any evidence that they have ever fought to death. But they can fight and harm each other. During the fighting of some primates, they kill those babies so that they can now have the females in the estrus period and start the mating process and also produce their own. That's how we get new groups, new families started. We are communicating with the trackers. They are just in front of us some few meters. When you see the trackers that means the gorillas are near. The guys have already done a wonderful job of locating them to us. MEDI: He has located the gorillas. They have started from where they left them yesterday. The smell also helps them. Mostly the smell from the armpits of the silverback. [MUSIC PLAYING] LEVI: When you get to the gorillas, we branch into the bush to directly where the gorillas are. As I told you that they very, very closely related to us, and we are visiting them everyday, so at times we also monitor to see maybe they could get like some germs, some bacterias, parasites from human beings. The jungle here is very dense. So you may be asking yourselves, how do we know the population. We found the last night nests, which are here. And then when we want to know group categories, we have to look at the dung. For the babies it's small. The juveniles, also small a bit. Then adult female also small somehow. But for the silverback it's big. And as he said that when trackers are following, they have got signs they go looking for. So for them they were looking for the feedings like these ones, which they have left behind. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: There's only 720 of them that exist in the world. And they're all in this area. And there's pressures for other resources. With minerals, [INAUDIBLE], gold, oil and gas, it has huge threats for the future. What happened in the Virunga National Park in DRC, where 10 gorillas were killed was a combination of an economic and a political statement. It wasn't poaching by local communities for food or for subsistence. The tensions are still there from the conflict between Rwanda and DRC. There's many rebel factions that are hiding out in those forests. Supplying charcoal to the cities, transporting it to do the population centers was a multimillion dollar operation that was helping to support a lot of these rebel factions and keep them in business, allow them to function. And they were working through the local population. It's also a sign the presence of conservation was getting on their nerves, so they were not able to operate with impunity. So they were making a sign. You guys care so much about these mountain gorillas, well we're gonna make a sign that's really going to have an impact on you. [MUSIC PLAYING] MEDI: So some gorillas are going up in the tree. [GROWLING] [GORILLA NOISES] DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Gorillas really hold a real fascination, I think, from history. All of us grew up with Tarzan movies and King Kong. And they've always held a mystery. And they're always so close to humans, but the image of being so strong. And often a mistaken image of them being so ferocious. [GROWLING] DR. RICHARD CARROLL: A silverback gorilla is big. It weighs 400 pounds and has big canines and a huge jaw to defend his harem. So he's defending his resources, as well. That exists in our primate memory that carries on to today. -He's picking his nose. -He is. He just ate it. DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Gorillas live in pretty low density. There's aggression between the silverbacks trying to compete for females and things like that. But there's enough room. We are in such high population densities in a shrinking planet. Right now with the amount of people on this planet we need two planets to support us. And it's going to lead to more and more conflict over resources. We're producing climate change that's going to change those resources and make them scarcer. All the time it's more people. And I felt from the beginning that if we as humans can't protect our closest family relatives then we really will fail as a species ourselves. [MUSIC PLAYING]