American Anthropologist Carries On the Close-Up Study of Rwanda’s Mountain Gorillas

David Watts was 10,400 feet up Mt. Bikereri and knee-deep in a tangled carpet of wet vines and thistle when he realized, a moment too late, that he stood between his old friend Puck and a patch of wild celery she urgently wanted to sample.

With one enormous hairy hand, Puck grabbed Watts’ leg and scolded him with a rumbling belch: “Huh, huh, huh.”

“Puck doesn’t like any nonsense from us, especially when she’s in a ‘mood,’ ” Watts explained after the annoyed gorilla let go of his ankle.

“I just wish I could tell her: ‘I was trying to get out of your way but it wasn’t clear where you wanted me to go,’ ” he said. “But part of being here is understanding that I will get treated like another gorilla.”

Scientists here have been treated a bit like mountain gorillas for 20 years, ever since American naturalist Dian Fossey began studying the rare and endangered primates and subsequently revealed their shy, gentle personalities.

Despite human encroachment on the gorilla habitat, long-running battles with poachers and Fossey’s mysterious murder two years ago, her research project has survived as a sanctuary of pure science on the remote, misty slopes of central Africa.

Fossey’s successors, now led by Watts, a University of Michigan anthropologist, observe and record the daily soap opera of Gorilla gorilla beringei behavior and family life. And, like Fossey, they grow attached to these magnificent apes, drawn in ways more purely human than dryly scientific.

Decline in Poaching

Poaching, although still a threat, has declined and the world’s mountain gorilla population has stabilized, with 279 living on the Virunga volcanoes, a 25-mile chain of peaks that forms the border between Rwanda and Zaire, and about half that many gorillas in Uganda’s Ruwenzori range.

But an even more serious threat exists these days for the world’s remaining mountain gorillas. The pressure for farmland is building in tiny Rwanda, already the most densely inhabited country in Africa--at current growth rates its population will double within two decades. Conservationists and Rwandese officials find it increasingly difficult to be optimistic about the gorillas’ long-term future.

But the scientists press on from their remote base, the Karisoke Research Center. The center, a few cabins with green metal siding, is a two-hour climb from the nearest dirt road.

Work here begins early, in the cool, damp air. Watts, 35, pulls on a pair of rubber boots and garden gloves and shrugs on a backpack. He has spent more than four years, during two stints, studying the gorillas here.

After their morning routine, Watts and the center’s chief tracker, Antoine, set out in search of the gorilla group known as Group 5. Following winding, inches-wide paths or cutting his own with a machete, Antoine leads the way.

A curtain of heavy mist hangs over mountains so wet that moss climbs high up the tall hagenia trees. Miniature rapids usher the previous night’s rain away. The rubber boots slosh on through the mud.

An hour later, a rippling sound like faraway thunder echoes through the forest: the voices of Group 5.

Throat-Clearing Sounds

The tracker returns to camp, leaving Watts alone with his gorillas. He approaches, warning them of his arrival with a series of throat-clearing sounds: “Huh-unnhh. Huh-unnhh. Huh-unnhh.” Then he sits among them, extracts a blue notebook and pen from his backpack and settles in for the day.

Mountain gorillas, a subspecies discovered only this century, are much rarer than the lowland gorillas. They have long, straight black hair, expanded nostrils and broad chests. They may grow as tall as 5 1/2 feet, weigh 350 pounds and live 60 years.

As Fossey discovered, they are powerful, but shy and gentle vegetarians who organize relatively harmoniously into family groups ranging from two to two dozen or more. And they have distinctly different personalities.

Group 5--with 24 gorillas, it’s the largest of the center’s three research groups--is headed by Ziz, a 16-year-old silverback who inherited the group from his father, Beethoven, who died two years ago. (Males become fully mature at 15, and about that time the hair on their back begins to turn gray.)

Watts sits near each of the group’s members for a time, jotting down his observations. He moves slowly when he’s among the gorillas, trying not to startle them. Some days they ignore him; at other times they are playful, trying to steal his cameras or notebook.

Group 5, the longest-studied gorilla family, is accustomed to human contact, and a few of the apes even pat Watts on the shoulder as they pass by. Others have shown signs of real affection for humans, often hugging or sitting in contact with them.

Close Relationships

Fossey developed very close relationships with the gorillas, and she encouraged physical contact between gorillas and humans. To be accepted by the gorillas, she even used to scratch, beat her chest, eat wild greens and hoot and grunt.

Although some criticized that approach over the years, Watts has not tried to stop the researchers and gorillas from touching each other.

“When you’re sitting in the middle of them, you have to be accepted to some extent,” Watts said. “We could have discouraged it more than we have and there I’m open to criticism, but when you get here and it happens to you and you realize how wonderful it is, it’s fairly hard to be the ruthless scientist and say ‘I can’t allow this.’

“Maybe that’s not strictly proper. On the other hand, these animals are so extraordinary that anyone who comes here to work really falls in love with them. You get caught up in their lives, and they become important in your own emotional life.”

The fragile relationship between humans and these gorillas was tested earlier this summer when Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures rented the Parc des Volcans from the Rwandan government to shoot a feature film based on Fossey’s life, starring Sigourney Weaver.

Watts was worried about the effect of the filming on the gorillas, but his misgivings dissolved soon after he introduced the actress and film crew to Group 5.

The gorillas watched with quiet interest as the crew set up its equipment. Then, as if on cue, with the cameras rolling, Ziz stood up, beat his chest and rushed down the hillside, plopping down next to Weaver, with his back to her.

Only One Star Allowed

“Ziz and the others saw how, in our group, we treated Sigourney as someone special, setting her apart from ourselves,” Watts said. “I think this was just Ziz’s way of saying, ‘Around here, I’m the special person.’ ”

When that day’s film arrived back in California, Watts was later told, one admiring studio executive remarked that “the animal trainers must be pretty close by.”

In Rwanda, the government hopes that the film will bring a boom in tourism in the way that “Out of Africa” spurred a surge in Kenya’s safari bookings. But the number of tourists allowed to see the gorillas is strictly limited and the daylong excursions are fully booked a month or more in advance. Only four gorilla families are available for viewing (Group 5 and the other research groups are off limits) and only six tourists a day are taken by park guides to see each group.

The cost of spending an afternoon with the gorillas is about $75 per person. Although the government does not intend to increase the number of gorilla viewers, fearing that large groups will intimidate the apes, it is planning a substantial price hike next year, to about $145 a person.

Fossey saw tourism as a major threat to the gorillas and feared that Karisoke would become a tourist attraction and the research would stop after she was gone.

A National Resource

But Karisoke remains devoted only to science, and Watts says the revenue and prestige Rwanda receives from its gorillas are “what’s really saving the gorillas at the moment. The government knows it has a valuable resource worth saving.”

“The gorillas are very important to us,” said Etienne Nyangezi, chief of services for the Rwandese Office of National Parks and Tourism. “We are dedicated to safeguarding them--and developing our tourist trade.”

But most conservationists say tourism won’t be enough to protect the mountain gorillas from extinction. Rwanda’s population, 3 million when Fossey began her research, is 6 million now and increasing by 3.7% a year, one of the highest growth rates in the world.

That has increased pressure for land in Rwanda, a country smaller than Maryland and which has devoted 11% of its area to national parks. Virtually every other square foot is cultivated, from the tops of its many hills to the edge of Parc des Volcans.

One day soon, when Rwandans can no longer feed themselves or find enough wood to keep warm or enough bamboo to build houses, this lush habitat for the mountain gorilla may vanish.

“The parks, we argue, should remain as they are,” said Nyangezi, the Rwandan park official. “Even if we gave the park lands to be inhabited, it wouldn’t be enough to solve our problems.”

Discouraging Poachers

Watts says the presence of tourists and guides in the park discourages poachers and helps monitor the gorillas for evidence of poaching or trapping. Traps that poachers set for antelope and buffalo sometimes snare gorillas, who can die if the wounds are not treated. But no gorillas have been killed by poachers in nearly two years.

Soon after Dian Fossey accepted anthropologist Louis Leakey’s invitation to study the mountain gorillas, she became a formidable enemy of poachers, who sold gorilla heads for mantelpiece trophies and gorilla hands for such things as ashtrays.

Her National Geographic films and articles, as well as her 1983 book, “Gorillas in the Mist,” gave her a worldwide reputation as a protector of these animals on the verge of extinction.

She formed the Digit Fund to raise money to fight poachers, and the fund’s two-man anti-poaching unit still patrols these mountains. The fund was named for a gorilla named Digit--”my beloved Digit,” she called him--who was killed and mutilated by poachers in 1977.

After finishing her book, she returned to Karisoke, telling associates she intended to spend the rest of her life here with the gorillas. But her health was poor. A chain-smoker, she had emphysema and could no longer make the daily trek to see the gorillas. The research assistants doubted that she would live much longer.

Shocking Murder

Then, one night in December, 1985, Fossey, 53, was hacked to death in her cabin at Karisoke. The murder weapon was a machete, which is commonly used to clear trails.

Some speculated that angry poachers might have killed her. But Rwandan authorities eventually charged one of Fossey’s young research assistants, Wayne McGuire, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Oklahoma.

McGuire, acting on the advice of the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda, had returned to the United States days before the charges were filed. He strongly denied having “anything to do with . . . the death of my friend and mentor.”

Last December, a Rwandan tribunal tried McGuire in absentia, found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. (The government also charged a Rwandan, who had been fired from his job at the Karisoke center after an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to kill Fossey with a machete. The man hanged himself in his cell before he could be brought to trial.)

Fossey’s death remains a mystery everywhere but in Rwanda, where the case has been officially closed.

Watts, a former research assistant for Fossey, returned as director of the center five months after her death. The number of scientists working with Watts depends on the projects under way, but the only assistant here now is Lorna Anness, who is studying mothers and infants on a grant from the Digit Fund.

Watts has been focusing on the movement of female gorillas from one group to another. It had been thought that females joined new social groups without difficulty, but seven females have joined Group 5 in the past 18 months “and already some of the six original female group members are not in the least bit happy,” Watts said.

Female Harassment

The newcomers’ reaction to harassment from resident females has varied. Liza, who returned to the group after being away for six years, simply ignores it. Simba, on the other hand, is clearly upset by it and actively tries to force her way into the group’s good graces.

“Even after 20 years of uninterrupted research, there is still much we don’t know about the mountain gorillas,” Watts said. “There are tremendous variances in their behavior, and a lot of flexibility in their social system.

Living in virtual isolation, the researchers at Karisoke still get wrapped up in the day-to-day lives of the mountain gorilla families, much as Fossey herself did. Fossey often said she liked gorillas more than people, and none of her associates doubted it.

When a gorilla died, its body was brought to Karisoke and buried beneath a bed of clover in front of her cabin. The cemetery grew over the years, and each grave has a wooden marker bearing the gorilla’s name: Uncle Bert, Macho, Kweli, Beethoven--more than a dozen in all.

Digit is buried there as well. “Gentle, trusting, loyal Digit,” Fossey once wrote. “Now only a memory in a mound before my cabin.”

Next to Digit is another mound, circled with stones. The marker reads, simply, Dian.