Charity Project

Charity
Project

Cross River Gorillas

PROJECT: Cross River Gorillas

LOCATION OF IMPACT: Cameroon

PROJECT COST: £75,000

With fewer than 300 individuals estimated to exist in the wild, the Cross River Gorilla Programme is a collaborative effort to protect the world’s rarest great ape. Since 2004, our work has led to the successful gazettement of several protected areas. We are also developing a chain of Community Forest Reserves, together forming a rainforest corridor. Conservationists recently captured images of a group of rare Cross River gorillas with multiple babies in Nigeria’s Mbe mountains – a sign that the subspecies once feared to be extinct is reproducing amid protection efforts.

Cross River gorillas are rarely seen, let alone photographed, even by remote cameras. Previously, camera traps at project sites in Cameroon and Nigeria have captured just a few images including one from 2012 in Cameroon’s Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary showing one member of the group missing a hand likely from snare injury. In the Mbe Mountains and Afi Mountains in Nigeria, camera traps photographed a mother carrying a single infant on her back and lone silverbacks on separate occasions. Those images were obtained in 2013 and on separate occasions since then, but these recent images are the first time that multiple infants have been recorded in the same group.

$100 - will fund a half-day field trip to a nearby nature reserve for a class of 30 students.
$180 - will pay for the salary of a trained Community Ranger for one month.
$160 - will pay for a trained educator to lead a full-day conservation education workshop for 30 students.
$270 - will pay for the purchase of a camera trap needed for monitoring great apes and other wildlife.
$480 - will fund a fully equipped team of Community Rangers conducting surveillance for 10 days.
$600 - will fund a series of six conservation education classes for a school of 200 students.
$960 - will pay for one months of great apes monitoring and surveillance.
$1,500 - will pay for the training of 6 community rangers.
$2,600 - will help fund the equipment of one team of Community Rangers.
$4,300 - will support the establishment of community-based forest management committees.
$6,500 - will cover the costs for boundary and vegetation mapping of one proposed Community Forest.
$30,000 - will fund the development and registration of one Community Forest.
$140,000 - will help fund the construction of a ranger station to support monitoring and patrolling of the great apes reserve.
$500,000 - will help secure Cross River gorillas in the Tofala-Mone Rainforest Corridor for 2 years.