GORILLA SAFARIS, GORILLA TREKKING UGANDA
Gorillas are largest of the great apes, the group that includes chimpanzees and orang-utans. Genetically, humans, chimps and gorillas are very closely related-we share 97% of the same genes with gorillas, and 98% with chimp! A scientist from another planet would not hesitate to classify us all in the same genes. Human scientists place us and the apes in the super family Hominoidea within the order primates. Other primates include monkeys, lemurs and bushbabies. Apes differ from monkeys in being larger, having bigger brains and no tails.
The gorillas in Bwindi and Mgahinga are mountain gorillas, the rarest of the three sub species of gorillas. All gorillas occur exclusively in the dense forest of the west and central Africa. Mountain gorillas are found only in the Virunga Volcanoes and Bwindi.` 
our changing perception of gorillas
African people have long known that gorillas lived in the forests. To the rest of the world, however, gorillas were for centuries mysterious and largely unknown.
The stories brought home by early European explorers were greatly exaggerated descriptions of ferocious, man like beasts that bore little resemblance to the actual animals. The name “gorilla” may originate from one such story. Over 2000 years ago, an explorer named Hanno from the North African city of Carthage encountered apes on the coast of West Africa. He described a wild battle where several of his men were wounded and scratched trying to capture live specimens. In his language gorilla meant, “the scratcher” and while the apes he met were probably chimpanzees, the name has remained with gorillas throughout the centuries. The gorilla was first formally described as a species by scientist in 1847.
Three subspecies of gorilla are recognized, the Western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), the eastern lowland gorilla (G. g. graueri), the mountain gorilla (G. g. beringei). The mountain gorilla is the rarest of all the apes.
It is slightly larger than the lowland gorillas (although the largest wild specimen on record was an eastern lowland gorilla from the Kahuzi-Biega region in congo). Mountain gorillas were only ‘discovered’ by the scientific community in the 20th century. Most gorillas collected and described previously were of the more common western lowland variety. Rumours of gorillas living in the mountains of central Africa weren’t confirmed until two animals were shot on the slopes of Mt. Sabinyo in 1902. The hunter was a German army officer named Oscur von Beringe, whose name was later attached to the subspecies beringei
In later expeditions, hunters killed more 50 gorillas in the Virunga area for museum collections. Typically, they exaggerated their bravery in defeating these fearsome monsters. The “king kong” image prevailed. However, one hunter, Carllas Akeley of the American Museum of natural history, was awed enough by gorillas that he encouraged the Beligian government to create Albert national park in order to preserve some space for them in 1925.But in the 60’s when the civil unrest spread, the gorillas’ habitat was increasingly whittled away by administrative division, cattle, farmers, and colonial agriculture schemes.
The numbers of gorillas themselves were decreasing by snares and gun shots, even parts of them sold to tourist. Numbers in the Virunga region went steadily down.
Gorilla Research and education
In 1959 George Schaller was the first to study gorillas in the Virunga volcanoes, and he also spent a brief time in Bwindi.his pioneering work for the first time revealed the true nature of the gorillas to the world, as a shy, gentle, peace-loving vegetarian.
Dian Fossey succeeded him in 1967. She and her assistants achieved an amazing report with the gorillas, and further studied their ecology and behavior. Meanwhile, films and popular articles about these gorillas made them world famous. Dr Fossey was killed in 1985 and was buried in the Virungas among the 17 gorillas that had been killed by poachers during her studies. The research station she established at Karisoke in Rwanda still exists today.
There has also been en effort to extend knowledge about gorillas to local people .In 1978, the wildlife conservation society of New York helped to establish the first conservation education program for Rwandans living around the mountain gorillas. Instead of seeing the remnant forest as a preserve for tourist, gorillas and foreign researchers, local people began to see the importance of the whole area as a resource, especially for water catchment.
The International Gorilla Conservation Program, CARE, and several other international programs are working with protected area authorities of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, and communities surrounding all the gorilla parks.
Their aim is to integrate tourism, law enforcement, education, research, and community development. This approach has been very successful in changing attitudes. Local people now know that the forests and gorillas are of great value on many levels. Before public awareness campaigns, more than 50% of the local farmers want to convert the parks to farm land, now more than 70%want the forest preserved because they realize conservation is their best strategy for survival.
The battle for the survival of the gorillas and their forest home is not won. There are too few gorillas, the protected area is too small, and education and community outreach is still in need of expansion. Even, humans have already learned a lot about gorillas from the years of effort at research and education and puplicity. If you have seen some of these creatures, so obviously our kin, you will know that these apes are a primal part of all human heritage.
Distribution
Gorillas once inhabited the entire rainforest that stretched from the coast of west Africa to the Western arm of the Great Rift Valley. But when the climate dried out during the ice ages, the extensive forests receded into pockets. As a result the gorillas became divided into western eastern populations Overtime, separation and genetic drift led to the development of three subspecies. The western lowland lives in the lowland rainforests of West Africa (Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, etc.) while 1000 kilometers to the east, the eastern lowland gorilla inhabits the forests of eastern Congo. The mountain gorilla is found only in two small populations; about 290 in the Bwindi forest and about 300 in the Virunga volcanoes, on the eastern side of the Great Rift Valley. The drier climate of the valley has been a barrier to the gorilla migrations long enough for the mountain gorilla to become its own subspecies. Isolation in their islands of mid high-altitude forest, the mountain gorilla developed longer hair, wider chests, broader jaws and other adaptations that distinguish them from the lowland counterparts.
Bwindi gorillas look physically intermediate between Virunga and lowland populations. Living in medium- altitude forest, they were once thought to be lowland gorillas. Genetic comparisons, however, show that the Mgahinga/ Virunga and Bwindi gorillas are the same subspecies. They have been separated by cultivation for only 500 years. Before that, they were likely part of a single population that inhabited arrange of altitudes. Further research is currently examining the interesting differences between the two populations.
Mountain gorillas have never been reared successfully in captivity, and there are none in zoos. Thankfully, they still exist in their tiny remnant of forest homes here in the Virungas and Bwindi,but their numbers are alarmingly small and dwindling along with their remaining habitat. Their official status is “critically endangered”.
Only some 600 survive in about 765km2 of habitat. This is not even the number of people in one hamlet in the ocean of humanity that surrounds these protected places. (There is only one mountain gorilla for every ten million people on earth.)