December 4, 2012

Fossey Fund Gorilla Monitoring Resumes After Camp Attack

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s regular monitoring of mountain gorilla groups in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park resumed today, after a two-day interruption caused by an attack on one of its anti-poaching camps on December 2, in which the camp was destroyed and one of our rangers killed.

As the day started, Felix Ndagijimana, director of our Karisoke Research Center, met with all of the trackers, and reported proudly that morale was high and everyone was eager to resume duty. All of our gorilla tracking teams were ready, with five people each. Trackers from our anti-poaching team and from our biodiversity programs were also included.

Once in the forest, all of our trackers started off the morning from the locations they had last left the gorillas on Saturday. However, the traces of the gorilla groups were now several days old and had been washed away by heavy rains, so most could not be easily located that way. Of eight gorilla groups we currently follow, only two were able to be located today, but we are confident we will be able to locate most of them within the next couple of days.

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