Charity Project

Charity
Project

Cross River Gorillas

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.