The comeback of the mountain gorilla

山地大猩猩的回归

Today in Focus

2025-10-29

29 分钟
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Patrick Greenfield hikes up the Virunga mountains in east Africa to trace the remarkable comeback of the mountain gorilla. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
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  • This is The Guardian.

  • Today, a hike to meet the mountain gorillas of Varunga.

  • It's one of the maddest things I've ever been to.

  • It's a bit like Glastonbury, but if it was in the amazing national park surrounded by volcanoes,

  • Something that's very striking about this habitat is you kind of have humanity,

  • agricultural fields, buildings, and then it stops and it's the forest.

  • And we were right on the edge of that.

  • The atmosphere, it was one of kind of real excitement.

  • Lots of people kind of in party mode.

  • and we just watched this really amazing performance of people dressed as kind of zebras and drafts and gorillas and that represented different elements of the forest.

  • When Patrick Greenfield, the Guardian's biodiversity reporter,

  • went to visit Mounting Gorillas in Rwanda,

  • he was expecting the peace of the forest, the silent observation of animals in the wild.

  • Instead, he found himself in the middle of a huge knees-up.

  • We arrived really early in the morning, five-sixth, and even then the DJs were playing,

  • there was music blasting up into the mountains under this enormous stage that had two mountain gorillas made out of some kind of grass,

  • lots of kind of randon flags and people waving away.

  • This was Queeta Izina, where thousands of people gather to take part in an annual naming ceremony.

  • for baby mountain gorillas.

  • The gorillas aren't actually there.