In danger of extinction: Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla

Our closest relative is still in danger of extinction, but a dramatic breakthrough in the Congo means that four orphaned gorillas, rescued from hunters and successfully reintroduced into the wild, have all given birth. Ed Caesar witnesses a remarkable renaissance.

Published: 13 January 2007

It's the babies' hands, big and supple and jet black, that you notice first. Hands like a carpenter's. Hands that already look like they have been long in the world. Hands that are called into active service from their first day. Because, when a baby gorilla is born, there is only one thing it absolutely must do to survive - hang on.

These mitts belong to the newest arrivals in a remarkable group of gorillas in the Congo's Lefini Reserve, collectively called "the Djekes". The Djekes know how to hang on. Made up of nine Western Lowland Gorillas (properly, and rather eye-catchingly, named Gorilla gorilla gorilla), all orphans of the bushmeat trade that has ravaged central Africa's ape population, the group was reintroduced into its natural habitat in 2004 by the Projet Protection des Gorilles (PPG), a project sponsored by Britain's John Aspinall Foundation.

In the past two months, something wonderful has happened: four gorillas have been born to four different mothers in the group. The babies were only the second, third, fourth and fifth gorillas ever to be born to reintroduced parents (the first, Teke, another Aspinall triumph who was born two years ago across the river, was the first gorilla to be born in the area for more than five decades).

Seeing these little miracles, though, is not easy. One has to travel to Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, with its shambling shantytown facing off against its violent neighbour, Kinshasa, across the great Congo River. Through the flooded traffic scrums and pothole dodgems of a Brazzaville rush hour. Through the sanctioned bribery ("monnaie monsieur!") of the military checkpoints on the North Road out of the capital. Through the roadside villages where children in their Wayne Rooney shirts read schoolbooks at the bottom of streetlights. And, finally, to the Lefini Reserve, part of 170,000 hectares of wilderness maintained and protected by the PPG, 100 miles and a world away from Brazzaville.

It's worth it. The scale of this latest achievement can be measured by the fact that the first arrival in this mini-epidemic of new gorillas, a boy born to a bashful nine-year-old called Massabi, was called "Likamuisi" - it means "nice surprise" in Lingari. And it can be measured, too, by the fragility of young gorilla life. On the day before we came to visit this famous young family, one little girl, Odzinowe ("never forget"), the daughter of a young mother called Tchivou, died, aged one month.

When we set out from the Abio Camp (which has its own Hippopotamus in a lake in the back garden) to see the gorillas, the joy at the new arrivals is tempered by sadness over the loss of Odzinowe. And, as we plough up the Louna river in our makeshift speedboat - cruising like Conrad with an outboard up the muddy, jungle-lined waters - our guide, the project's biologist Tony King, tells us that the gorillas will be feeling it too. He says that, like humans, gorillas feel trauma, and that there is, for instance, a noticeable correlation between the age at which a gorilla loses its mother and how well that infant will adapt to a new life.

But today, Tchivou does not look like she is in mourning. And the rest of the group are boisterous, particularly the boys. While Djeke, the dominant male, is happy enough stealing a raincoat from our canoe as we come ashore, and wearing it around his shoulders for the rest of f our visit like a twitcher on a field trip, the subordinate males are much more interested in some casual bullying. And like all bullies, they target the new boys, which, today, happen to be my photographer and me.

Kelle, a 10-year-old black back with mischief written on his face and never far from his thoughts, prowls around us, occasionally making fast shoulder-first darts into the intruding group of bipeds. A cheeky eight-year-old, Kama, meanwhile, attacks the fringes of our travelling tortoise formation, taking swipes at the unfamiliar legs and trying to steal notepads, cameras, glasses, and whatever he can get his clever hands on.

Seeing the mothers, then, is tricky. But when we are, at last, allowed close enough to the young mums, Massabi and Mpoumbou, we find them sitting with their fragile charges, Likamuisi and Bousomi ("freedom"), close to their chest. But they will not let us get close. It is only Koto, the senior female of the group - and, in many ways, a more dominant figure than Djeke - who lets us sit with her. It's a magical moment: her large, expressive eyes looking over us with all the glazed bliss of a new mother, and our distance maintained by friendly nudges from her vast free arm. And her baby, Elonga ("victory"), with its fluffy hair, its hint of early redness - a feature of the Western gorilla - and those worldly hands, would melt any heart.

Humans, naturally, are drawn to animals that look like us. Anthropomorphic means cute. Few would care about the plight of an endangered fruit fly because it is hard to foist human emotions on to it. It has long been a bone of contention among conservationists that ugly, endangered creatures - the ones that don't look like people - do not receive the attention they deserve.

But we should not feel guilty about our special love for the apes. Gorillas are important not just because they look like us, but because they are us. At least, they are in terms of 98 per cent of their DNA.

We should feel that affection now, more than ever, because the gorillas are dying. Although the Congo's Western Lowland Gorilla has a population estimated by scientists at anywhere between 30,000 and 80,000 - far more populous than its high- altitude cousin, the Eastern Mountain Gorilla, whose numbers are under 1,000 - it is still in peril. The bushmeat trade, whereby gorillas are hunted for their meat, is on the up in the north of the country where the gorillas live in the dense forests. As the hardwood logging companies drive deeper and deeper into the jungle, the gorillas are seeing their habitats destroyed and the arrival of hungry hordes of timber workers.

But perhaps an even greater threat to the species comes from Ebola. Dr Peter Walsh, of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, this month estimated that the virus had killed up to a quarter of the world's gorilla population in the past 15 years. It is no surprise, then, to find the Western's numbers are plummeting. The Eastern Mountain Gorilla, meanwhile, has curbed further loss of population and is actually making tentative progress in its high-altitude home in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

So what good can three baby gorillas do in the face of such a pessimistic outlook?

"It's not a huge number of gorillas," says Amos Courage, Overseas Project Director for the John Aspinall Foundation, "but it's enormously significant symbolically. It has focused the world's attention on the plight of the gorillas, and has given the Congolese cause for some national pride, too. Long may that continue. Anything we can do to put a value on gorillas and to show that they are worth our time and investment is absolutely worthwhile ... we hope it translates to people having more respect for the wild populations."

Symbolic or not, the successes of the past two years have been the result of two decades of work in the Congo. The Projet Protection des Gorilles started life as a one-house orphanage for gorillas in Brazzaville in 1986. Funded by John Aspinall, a charismatic gambler with a love for wild animals, the project started out purely as a welfare project to look after apes whose parents had fallen victim to the bushmeat trade. In the past 10 years, three groups of gorillas that were reared by humans in the project have been reintroduced into the PPG-protected reserves 100 miles north of the capital, where they have, reassuringly, exhibited the behaviour of wild gorillas.

But it has not been plain sailing. Congo erupted in civil war in the mid-1990s, and the PPG's fragile rescue operation was thrown into jeopardy. "We flew about 15 gorillas out of the Lefini site to Pointe Noire [on the Congolese coast] in a C-130 helicopter," recalls Courage. "First we started talking to mercenaries, but after two days of negotiations they realised we were talking about hairy gorillas, rather than military guerrillas, and they refused to help. So we got a Lebanese group to help us.

"Meanwhile, I had broken my leg and was stuck in Brazzaville, trying to get the gorillas out of the zoo. The legionnaires all thought it was hilarious, but I was shit-scared. They couldn't see why I'd want to save these gorillas, until I told them that the open market value of a breeding gorilla family was around a quarter of a million dollars. Then they agreed to help me."

Even when there's not a civil war, working in Congo is trying. Brazzaville's bureaucracy is Byzantine, and there are palms to be greased at every stage. The basic infrastructure of the country, too, is in bits. Most days, either the electricity is off, or the water is off, or both. King recalls how, at Christmas in 2002, he was stuck looking after a baby gorilla in Brazzaville with no electricity or water for three weeks. "We were frying eggs over a candle," he says. f

It's time to go. The Djekes are restless. Kelle is alternating between sucking his lips in and baring his teeth - King says that's not a good sign - and Djeke himself seems to have tired of playing with the raincoat, and is looking in our direction. Even Loulou, at seven, the youngest female in the group, is playing the leg swiping game. It is all our rangers can do to keep the gorillas at bay, and although there is a certain amount of playfulness in their aggression, we don't want to step over the line.

Courage, who has spent most of his life with gorillas, once stepped over the line, and almost did not live to tell the tale. In 2000, he was with a huge silverback male called Kola when he went too close to a female in season. Kola's subsequent attack was ferocious.

"I had been with the gorillas for four years in the Congo, and I thought I knew them well," he says. "But I stupidly ignored the fact that wild animals in season need to be avoided. Kola thought I was competition, and jumped on me. With another female in the group they pinned me down, and bit me for 10 minutes. They tried to bite my balls off - I think they wanted to neuter me. I was only saved by another male who I had helped raise, who dragged me away and kept Kola at bay, as I staggered back to the camp."

So when King tells us to get back in the canoe, we comply immediately. And, having waved goodbye to the world's most famous gorilla family, King takes us to see a silverback called Bhanga, who, the biologist says, is the bookies' favourite to be the father of the new gorillas. Of course, the PPG can't be sure of the gorillas' paternity until they can take a DNA test of the babies.

Bhanga lives on his own on a 25-hectare island, because having a silverback at large in the reserve was proving disruptive to the existing gorilla groups. He is vast - 200kg or more of muscle - and, at the moment, lonely. But he will soon be joined on his island by four other adult males, who are currently being housed in large cages back at the reserve's main camp. That's a lot of testosterone for not much island. "Sure, they might fight," says King. "But that's what gorillas do. It's better than living in a cage."

The fact that the adult males have had to be artificially separated from the rest of the groups is indicative of the ways in which the PPG has to play God with its gorillas. But in order to foster growth in the reserve, the gorillas must be managed in a slightly artificial way. There is, though, nothing artificial about the developments that have lit up the project in the past few months. So what now for the reserve?

"I imagine, now that we've had this breakthrough, the groups will grow and grow," says Courage. "We'll have five or six groups, hopefully, in the next 20 years ... It's enormously important in terms of educating the Congolese about how gorillas have value, and should be protected. We're hoping that people will be proud enough to stop hunting gorillas in the wild.

"Also, given the fact that the area around the reserve is Ebola-free, I have a feeling that what we are producing here could be a significant population in itself in a couple of decades. We're not a big organisation, like the WWF, and it has always been the individual orphan gorillas that have motivated us. But we're always thinking about the next step. We're actually looking for another site now - preferably one that has been denuded of wild gorillas - so that we can try another project."

For now, though, they have three precious new arrivals to look after. As primatologists gloomily predict that conditions for gorillas are now such that "ecological extinction" is a real possibility in the next few decades, bushmeat orphans are raising babies in the wild. The priorities for conservationists in the immediate future will be vaccination against Ebola for the Congo's wild northern population of Western Lowland Gorillas, along with strict controls on hunting gorillas in those areas. But the gorillas of the Lefini reserve are a powerful example of what can be achieved with sufficient care.

"But what do you call a success?" asks Courage. "These gorillas have got to survive and be self-sufficient for generations to come. This is only a start."

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