A female with a baby walks by. The baby is traveling piggyback style, his wide eyes looking with curiosity at the tourists who’ve just arrived to observe them. The mother, meanwhile, shows only mild interest. There’s no sound except for the crunching of the foliage beneath her feet, the occasional bird chirping and the juvenile munching contentedly in the branches above.
Moments like these are ordinary for the 700 or so mountain gorillas left in the wild. But for tourists trekking to see them in Rwanda’s Virunga National Park and other sites, the ordinary becomes magical.
A juvenile is the first to come into view in the dense, misty forest. He swings from a vine with one arm, his feet swaying back and forth. He twists and turns, grabbing leaves and shoving them in his mouth.
A female with a baby walks by. The baby is traveling piggyback style, his wide eyes looking with curiosity at the tourists who’ve just arrived to observe them. The mother, meanwhile, shows only mild interest. There’s no sound except for the crunching of the foliage beneath her feet, the occasional bird chirping and the juvenile munching contentedly in the branches above.
Moments like these are ordinary for the 700 or so mountain gorillas left in the wild. But for tourists trekking to see them in Rwanda’s Virunga National Park and other sites, the ordinary becomes magical.
“Seeing mountain gorillas is described as the most profound wildlife experience on the planet,” says Phil Ward, a mountain gorilla tour planning expert in Rwanda who is helping WWF plan its March 2010 trek.
Protecting the gorillas is a top priority for many in central Africa – and for WWF as well. Tourism dollars generated from trekking permits go to the surrounding communities, helping to create such infrastructure such schools, clinics and roads. To ensure that the gorillas are minimally disturbed, just a small group of tourists are permitted into Virunga National Park daily.
Getting to the elusive primates isn’t always easy. You could trek along steep and rugged terrain for as little as 15 minutes or as many as three hours or more before spotting gorillas. But for many, being in such close proximity to these gentle giants, and realizing just how closely their behavior and interactions mirror our own, is the experience of a lifetime.
“I feel like one of the most privileged people in the safari world,” says Ward, who has completed more than 120 treks in Rwanda and throughout central Africa.
Big Five
Buffalo
Buffalo are extremely large, ox-like animals. Standing approximately 65 inches at the shoulder, adult males have a mass of up to 1760 pounds and females weigh up to 1650 pounds. To support the large body, the legs are very heavy. Front hooves are larger than the hind because of the extra mass they carry in the huge head and thick neck. Both sexes carry horns, which in the males can grow to 1.5m. Buffalo varies considerably in size, with some of the forest populations half the size of those from the plains and Savannah.Elephant
The African Elephant is the largest living land mammal, one of the most impressive animals on earth. The Elephant's muscular trunk serves as a nose, hand, extra foot, signaling device and a tool for gathering food, siphoning water, dusting, digging and a variety of other functions. The long trunk permits the elephant to reach as high as 23 feet. It is capable of powerful twisting and coiling movements used for tearing down trees or fighting.The trunk of the African elephant has two finger-like structures at its tip. The tusks, another remarkable feature, are greatly elongated incisors (elephants have no canine teeth). Tusks grow for most of an elephant's lifetime and are an indicator of age. They are "right or left tusked" using the favoured tusk as a tool, shortening it from constant wear.
Leopard
The most secretive and elusive of the large carnivores, the leopard is also the shrewdest. Pound for pound, it is the strongest climber of the larger cats and is capable of killing prey far larger than itself.The coloring of the leopard varies from white to bright golden brown, spotted with black spots and rosettes. The rosettes consist of groups of 5 to 6 spots arranged in a tight ring.
The tail is longer than half the body length measured from head to tail. This fierce animal has small round ears and long whiskers growing from dark spots on the upper lip. The size of the leopard varies considerably. The leopard differs from the cheetah in having shorter legs, and rosette-like spots and is without the cheetah’s black "tear" marks from eye to mouth.
Lion
Lions are the second largest members of the feline family in the world. Lion are tan in colour and have a slightly white under-body, with a tuft of black hair at the end of their tails.
Most cat species live a fundamentally solitary existence, but the lion is an exception. It has developed a social system based on teamwork and a division of labour within the pride, and an extended but closed family unit centres around a group of related females. The average pride consists of about 15 individuals, including five to 10 females with their young and two or three territorial males that are usually brothers or pride mates.
Rhinoceros
The rhinoceros is a large, primitive looking mammal that in fact dates from the Miocene era millions of years ago. In recent decades rhinos have been relentlessly hunted to the point of near extinction. Since 1970 the world rhino population has declined by 90 percent, with five species remaining in the world today, all of which are endangered.
The white or square-lipped rhino is one of two rhino species in Africa. It in turn occurs as two subspecies, the southern and the northern. The southern dwindled almost to extinction in the early 20th century, but was protected on farms and reserves, enabling it to increase enough to be reintroduced. The northern white rhino has recovered in Democratic Republic of Congo from about 15 in 1984 to about 30 in the late 1990s. This population has been threatened by political conflict and instability.
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