Deep in the rainforest of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, a 23-year-old female gorilla named Kurudi feeds on a stand of wild celery. She bends the green stalks and, with long, careful fingers, peels off the exterior skin to expose the succulent inside.
Biologist Jean Paul Hirwa notes her meal on his tablet computer as he peers out from behind a nearby stand of stinging nettles.
The large adult male sitting next to her, known as a silverback, looks at him quizzically.
Photo: AP
Hirwa makes a low hum — “Ahh-mmm” — imitating the gorillas’ usual sound of reassurance.
“I’m here,” Hirwa is trying to say. “It’s OK. No reason to worry.”
Hirwa and the two great apes are all part of the world’s longest-running gorilla study — a project begun in 1967 by famed US primatologist Dian Fossey.
Photo: AP
Yet Fossey herself, who died in 1985, would likely be surprised that any mountain gorillas are still left to study.
Alarmed by rising rates of poaching and deforestation in central Africa, she predicted that the species could go extinct by 2000.
Instead, a concerted and sustained conservation campaign has averted the worst and given a second chance to these great apes, which share about 98 percent of human DNA.
Last fall, the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature changed the status of mountain gorillas from “critically endangered” to “endangered,” an improved, if still-fragile designation.
Highly regulated tour groups hike in the Rwandan rainforest to watch gorillas.
Ticket revenue pays for operating costs and outstrips what might have been made from converting the rainforest to potato farms and cattle pastures.
“With tourism, the tension is always not to overexploit,” said Dirck Byler, great ape conservation director at the non-profit Global Wildlife Conservation. “But in Rwanda, so far they’re careful, and it’s working.”
The idea of using tourism to help fund conservation was contentious when conservationists Bill Weber and Amy Vedder first proposed it while living in Rwanda during the 1970s and 1980s. Fossey herself was skeptical.
“The wonder of the gorillas’ lives, their curiosity, their social interactions — that’s something that could be accessible to others through tourism,” Vedder said.
Jean Claude Masengesho lives with his parents and helps them farm potatoes. About once a week, the 21-year-old earns a little extra money helping tourists carry their bags up the mountain, totaling about US$45 a month. He would someday like to become a tour guide, which could earn him about US$320 monthly.
The obstacle is that most tour guides have attended college and Masengesho is not sure how his family can afford tuition.
“It’s my dream, but it’s very hard,” he said. “In this village, every young person’s dream is to work in the park.”
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