Face-to-face with a gorilla
Our wildlife reporter Kathryn Miller travels to Uganda to meet some mountain gorillas and discovers an environmental success story.
We hear stories about the disappearing natural world all the time. 1 km of rainforest is cut down every three minutes and 100 species of plants, insects and animals become extinct every day. It's all very worrying-but sometimes there's good news too.
One important success is the mountain gorilla, which lives in the rainforests of Central Africa. Twenty years ago there were only 350 gorillas left in the wild and their mountain home was disappearing fast. But thanks to organisations like the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), there are now over 700 gorillas in the wild and the rainforests where they live are national parks. One reason why gorillas haven't become extinct is, surprisingly, tourism. Every year tourists spend $3 million visiting national parks in Uganda and Rwanda and another $17 million on food transport and accommodation. This gives local people a reason to protect the gorillas and their forest homes.
I've always wanted to meet a gorilla, so last month I flew to Uganda and paid about £2,000 for a seven-day ‘gorilla tour’. On the first day we went on a trip to the Volcano Bwindi National Park. We walked through the rainforest for two hours and looked for gorillas. It was hot, humid and very hard-work and then suddenly I was face-to-face with a gorilla! And not just one - a family of 22 gorillas were watching us from all sides. We took photos of them as they ate, climbed trees and played with their young. They weren't frightening-instead, it was incredible how similar they were to us. We spent an hour with the gorillas before we went back to our forest camp. At dinner that night, we talked about the day and everyone said it was one of the most incredible experiences of their lives.
The future for the gorillas isn't certain, but at least they still have a future. We share 98.4% of our DNA with these amazing animals and they are one of our closest living relatives. If we can't protect them, what hope is there for the rest of the natural world?