March 31, 2015

Gorilla groups keeping trackers busy

Elderly female mountain gorilla Maggie, who has been traveling on her own for three weeks, has not been seen for several days now. The last time our trackers saw her, she was near the border of Congo. We have two tracker teams searching for Maggie, as well as help from Rwanda park authorities. Our gorilla protection and monitoring officer at Karisoke, Jean Paul Hirwa, has created a map showing the areas that have been searched and the Congo border.

Our trackers are also finding many other challenging situations, including two groups that are traveling beyond our range (either in Congo or in inaccessible areas), groups that are sometimes split into two subgroups, interactions and transfers between groups, and groups beginning to go out of the park in search of bamboo shoots. Luckily, today they did reach Isabukuru's group, which is ranging very far away and requires an extremely long day for our trackers following them.