Gorilla Sound

Here, in Mondika, there are two different groups of habituated gorillas. Kingo’s group, which you already know, and Buka’s group. Buka is a new group and under the habituation process for 2 years. Since I arrived to Mondika, the only gorillas I met were Kingo and his family. And as all of you know, they are gorgeous. However, with my own eyes I wanted to see how gorgeous the group of Buka was as well. So I took my camera with me with the hope of capturing amazing moments in Buka’s group. But, things didn’t evolve like that. Before telling you the story, I should mention our daily routine after the work. There are two groups of researcher working for Kingo and for Buka. As I never known how difficult to habituate a group, when I see all the trackers and researchers, who work with Buka, look exhausted in the camp, several times I asked them with the fake knowledge I have ‘come on, how difficult it can be’; my base with gorillas is only with Kingo, who sleeps, eats, copulates without minding our present right next to him. So when I offered to go with Buka, I thought it would be a nice walk with many easily taken amazing shots. Prejudgment is one of the weak parts of the human mind. And from the first moment I came close with Buka, I came on to the realization that how wrong I was. When we approached, Buka was sleeping and there was a female around, totally hide their self in the thickest bushes. So you can only see patches of them. They were at least 30m away. And when they heard us, the female started to scream herself out. I backed off a little bit while the trackers and the researcher didn’t even blinked their eyes. Immediately, the trackers and the researcher started to act like eating the leaves and grooming each other for showing the gorillas that we were not caring about them, just there to eat and no damage would be given. The scan upon my eyes, were funny. Suddenly, we became the hungry and peaceful apes. After the female took the signal, she got relax but not much. Her eyes and Buka’s were on us. Especially on me. In the end, for them, I was the new female they never seen before. There were many branches between us. When I was trying to see them between all that branches, they were trying to do the same thing to me as well. Two different species, Homo sapiens and Gorilla gorilla gorilla, observing each other with curiosity. One more hairy than the other, but most probably similar ideas in the mind. ‘Who is that? Will it bring any trouble to me?’ After the fear overcame the curiosity, they left the area. And we tried to follow them with our best. However, they were fast and we have to run after them non-stop as every time we approach, they were running away from us to the invisible world of bushes. In Bahaka, Buka means back pain, because he always travels in thickets. And I started to see why the trackers named him Buka. I have never seen him anywhere else but bushes for whole day. And here we are, once more I was admired by the talent of trackers. They could hear, smell and see the things that are not visible to our eyes. The forest talks with them, as they were the people of the forest once. When I came back to the camp, I was totally exhausted. Nothing was easy with Buka and I couldn’t even take one picture:) However, I believe that they are as beautiful as Kingo and his family. Kingo is totally habituated and has no fear or anger towards us as far as if we know our limits. When you are around Kingo and his group, you feel like you are also one of the member of his group. That’s how they welcome you. Sometimes, you are not further away more than 3m and they don’t mind your presence. I would love to share a story that I experienced here. Kingo and his harem were having one of their beauty sleep again in an opening. Kusu, the playful and smart juvenile, hardly ever sleeps but stays in the sleeping area when everyone does. Kingo was sleeping 5m away from us and the females weren’t further away than that. We were in the middle of all these sleeping beauties. Then Kusu appeared right next to us. Maybe 2m away. I was trying to take something from my bag and he was following my movements and concentrated on the bag and what was inside. You could see the wonder in his eyes. When I put the bag under me to sit, this time he looked at my face and examined it for awhile. Mine and Roberta’s back were on the tree. Kusu came close to us and put his back on to the tree as well. We were back to back. I was turning my head to look at his beautiful face and he was doing the same thing to us. He was sitting right behind us, with a branch on his mouth, slowly biting it and time to time turning around to check us. We were sitting right behind him, with a notebook on the hand, slowly writing our notes and time to time turning around to check him. After awhile, he fell asleep while we were amused and trilled with their acceptance on us. Around them, we, members of the mankind, become the part of the group, only more clumsy than even Ugly’s new baby.