We did get two reports of injured gorillas yesterday - an adult female in one group has a wound on her hand. Trackers are going to assess and call me sometime today. In another group there is a 3 year old that is limping - apparently the little guys like to climb trees and sometimes fall out, or the tree limb breaks. This little guy also lost his mom to another group (silver backs steal females sometimes), but he hangs out with the old silverback Titus, who has been here since the Dian Fossey days. I've been told that this youngster is limping badly enough that he has a hard time keeping up with the group, but Titus always goes back to check on him and waits for him to catch up. Trackers looked at him this morning and he is much better, so no need for us to go have a look at him. It he were worse, I would have gone up to the group to assess him myself. We have a policy that we intervene only when the problem is human induced or life threatening - the goal is to let nature take its course to a certain extent, but not at the cost of a life. With only 700 individual mountain gorillas left each life is important. The other piece is that each intervention (anesthetic event, generally) is potentially dangerous to animals and people involved, so we have to make pretty serious cost/benefit decisions for each case. For these two, it does not sound like we'll be getting involved, but I'll let you know!
That's it for now. Happy Labor Day everyone!
Here's one of the lowland gorilla orphans we help care for in Kinigi - What a cutie-pie!
Wow - week 5 already! I think of weeks in camp time, ya know 5 out of 8, so it seems its flown by....just like camp!
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