LEVI: My name is Levi.

And I am one of the guides in the Impenetrable Forest.

Now this here Bwindi Forest is the forest very special for

being a home to critically endangered mountain gorillas.

Yeah, we are going to start the gorilla tracking journey.

And which will take us possibly the whole day into

the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, an island within the

communities.

When you look at the map of Africa, you get Uganda, then

bordering Congo, DRC, that is the location of Bwindi.

We started in an open place, and you can see here where we

are going, this is a primary forest now.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Mountain gorillas only exist on that

patch of habitat in the mountains of the Virungas.

And they only exist in those three countries, in just a

real small area.

They're not in zoos.

The zoo population of gorillas are western lowland gorillas,

for the most part.

So this is it.

Their whole survival rests in this patch of habitat that's

really isolated on these mountaintops.

And there's only 720 of them that exist in the world.

And they're all in this area And it's

surrounded by a sea of humans.

LEVI: These mountain gorillas, they are the great apes.

Human beings are also the great apes.

The behaviors, the way they behave when you look at them,

it's very, very marvelous.

They behave like people, like human beings.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: The first time that you see a gorilla

through that veil of vegetation, and he's looking

at you, and you look at him, and you catch him in the eye,

and it's really clear that there's a species connection.

We share a good part of our genes, and you can see so much

of human behavior reflected or derived from behavior of some

of the great apes.

LEVI: Mountain Gorillas are 99% vegetarians.

Most of the food they eat is leaves, bark

of trees, and fruits.

But 1% to make 100% of their food is the ants.

So they change that diet by eating ants,

actually to get proteins.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Opening up the forest with coffee

plantations and logging companies from Yugoslavia and

the French to Spanish to Dutch, when they came in to

get that very valuable hardwood out of the forest.

And of course, they're bringing labor

from around the country.

So the population demographics changed drastically.

So it's a very dense human population with agriculture

bordering right up to the parks.

LEVI: Lifespan of these mountain gorillas is 50 years,

here in the wild.

But when the people started settling around, then they

started clearing their habitat for farming.

And also killing them.

Then they started becoming very few.

Their numbers started reducing.

Bwindi has about half of the world's population,

which is about 340.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Bushmeat refers to the capture and

killing of wild game for commercial purposes.

They set snares on wildlife trails that are totally

indiscriminate.

And even gorillas get caught in them.

It'll tighten around its hand or foot, and

the hand will atrophy.

So there's a lot of mutilation and mortality from these

snares that are ubiquitous around the forest.

And so the real threats right now are human population

growth, it's the main threat.

Insecurity.

This area has been an area of political

instability for a long time.

In all three countries, there's been national

conflicts and regional conflicts.

Uganda went through years of the most horrible dictatorship

under Idi Amin, where wildlife populations were decimated

throughout the country.

Rwanda went through a genocide.

DRC has been at war since 1993 and before.

Millions of people died in those wars.

Millions of people displaced.

It goes on to right now.

LEVI: OK, this side where we are overlooking is Bwindi

Impenetrable Forest.

And as you go to the slope, on this side is DRC.

And where you see across, you see the bananas, that's the

village on the Uganda side.

But if you go beyond, then you are in the DRC.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LEVI: When we get to the gorillas, we will have a sound

that we make.

We imitate their vocalization so that they come down, they

know we are friendly, we have no problem to them.

And that's Sowendi That vocalization is [GROWLING ].

Like cause they also communicate.

They live with families, headed by silverbacks.

And having only one dominant silverback, only one lead

male, who leads the whole family.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: The first time I saw mountain gorillas

was in the Bwindi National Park in Uganda.

And when we got up there, the silverback gave us a really

great sideways sort of false charge to let us know that he

was the boss.

Interestingly, that silverback was missing a hand from a

snare wound.

What you need to do when you're around gorillas is do

everything you can do to look submissive.

Slowly go down to the ground, pretend like you're feeding on

leaves, and sort of act like a monkey, which comes sort of

naturally to some of us anyways.

But running is the wrong thing.

LEVI: If one dominant silverback

start getting weak--

he's very weak, he cannot protect the family--

he leaves the powers to the youngest, who is very strong

enough to defend the family.

But sometime they can fight.

We don't have any evidence that they have

ever fought to death.

But they can fight and harm each other.

During the fighting of some primates, they kill those

babies so that they can now have the females in the estrus

period and start the mating process and also

produce their own.

That's how we get new groups, new families started.

We are communicating with the trackers.

They are just in front of us some few meters.

When you see the trackers that means the gorillas are near.

The guys have already done a wonderful job of

locating them to us.

MEDI: He has located the gorillas.

They have started from where they left them yesterday.

The smell also helps them.

Mostly the smell from the armpits of the silverback.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LEVI: When you get to the gorillas, we branch into the

bush to directly where the gorillas are.

As I told you that they very, very closely related to us,

and we are visiting them everyday, so at times we also

monitor to see maybe they could get like some germs,

some bacterias, parasites from human beings.

The jungle here is very dense.

So you may be asking yourselves, how do we know the

population.

We found the last night nests, which are here.

And then when we want to know group categories, we have to

look at the dung.

For the babies it's small.

The juveniles, also small a bit.

Then adult female also small somehow.

But for the silverback it's big.

And as he said that when trackers are following, they

have got signs they go looking for.

So for them they were looking for the feedings like these

ones, which they have left behind.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: There's only 720 of them that

exist in the world.

And they're all in this area.

And there's pressures for other resources.

With minerals, [INAUDIBLE], gold, oil and gas, it has huge

threats for the future.

What happened in the Virunga National Park in DRC, where 10

gorillas were killed was a combination of an economic and

a political statement.

It wasn't poaching by local communities for food or for

subsistence.

The tensions are still there from the conflict between

Rwanda and DRC.

There's many rebel factions that are hiding

out in those forests.

Supplying charcoal to the cities, transporting it to do

the population centers was a multimillion dollar operation

that was helping to support a lot of these rebel factions

and keep them in business, allow them to function.

And they were working through the local population.

It's also a sign the presence of conservation was getting on

their nerves, so they were not able to operate with impunity.

So they were making a sign.

You guys care so much about these mountain gorillas, well

we're gonna make a sign that's really going to have

an impact on you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MEDI: So some gorillas are going up in the tree.

[GROWLING]

[GORILLA NOISES]

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Gorillas really hold a real

fascination, I think, from history.

All of us grew up with Tarzan movies and King Kong.

And they've always held a mystery.

And they're always so close to humans, but the

image of being so strong.

And often a mistaken image of them being so ferocious.

[GROWLING]

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: A silverback gorilla is big.

It weighs 400 pounds and has big canines and a huge jaw to

defend his harem.

So he's defending his resources, as well.

That exists in our primate memory that

carries on to today.

-He's picking his nose.

-He is.

He just ate it.

DR. RICHARD CARROLL: Gorillas live in pretty low density.

There's aggression between the silverbacks trying to compete

for females and things like that.

But there's enough room.

We are in such high population densities

in a shrinking planet.

Right now with the amount of people on this planet we need

two planets to support us.

And it's going to lead to more and more

conflict over resources.

We're producing climate change that's going to change those

resources and make them scarcer.

All the time it's more people.

And I felt from the beginning that if we as humans can't

protect our closest family relatives then we really will

fail as a species ourselves.

[MUSIC PLAYING]