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We’ve always known there was a family of wild chimpanzees that roamed the forest around park headquarters, but for the first time since anyone can remember, they’ve started to hang around the main camp, particularly taking interest in those 4 big, black, furry things at the Senkwekwe Orphan Gorilla Center.

Both the gorillas and the chimps are seriously curious about the other hairy creatures. The chimps have taken to visiting the gorilla enclosure almost every day to look at the 4 orhpans from the treetops, and even sometimes venturing down to the ground. In general, though, the gorillas want to be friends, and the chimps are scared of the gorillas and run if they get too close.

You might wonder how the chimps are getting inside the gorilla enclosure. Andre has seen them jump from an outside tree to an inside one - quite a distance, and too far for a gorilla to jump. He also believes they are small enough to crawl under the electric wire in certain places.

It’s been incredibly hard to get a photograph of the chimps as they seem to magically disappear the second a human gets anywhere near, but these photos were captured by Sarah Bendelow recently, outside the enclosure.

The new Tongo chimpanzee trek opened in January.

Our tourism development officer, Cai, could not wipe the huge smile off his face when he announced that the tourist numbers for January, about 350 visitors, were nearly the same as our 2011 high summer season months. Considering that January isn’t high season, this is fantastic.

Some possible reasons for the jump in numbers is that the word is getting out that we are the coolest national park in Africa (we’re not the slightest bit biased in saying this), that we have an erupting volcano you can get close to (and how many parks can claim that?), that we have a new awesome lodge for people to stay at in the park, and there’s a new chimpanzee trek available. Who wouldn’t want to come here?

On top of this, we received some excellent news (for us) that Rwanda is increasing the price of their gorilla treks to $750 per trek, a 50% increase in price. Since our treks are almost half the price ($400), we are hoping that people who want to see mountain gorillas in their natural habitat will come here instead. We can’t guarantee our price won’t increase some, but we’ll most likely keep it down so it’s affordable and we can increase our visitor numbers. Another big reason to smile!

And one last comment on tourism: it’s good for the park, it’s good for conservation, it’s good for the gorillas, and good for the community. 30% of revenue from tourist permits goes toward community projects. This year we will have much more to spend, with several planned projects that include roads and improving water sources for communities surrounding the park.

Tongo chimp.

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As of January 2012 Virunga National Park will once again offer visitors the chance to see chimps in the forests of Tongo. Tongo is situated 2 hours drive north of Goma, 3 hours drive from Bunagana and only 1 hours drive from Mikeno Lodge (Rumangabo).

Chimps in Tongo were previously habituated by Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) in the 1980s. Unfortunately due to the civil unrest in 1993 in DR Congo, FZS was unable to continue their work until September 2009 when they returned to Tongo and the habituation process was re-started in June 2010.

There are currently 36 individual chimpanzees who live in Tongo’s forests who can be tracked along some of the 80 km of trails. The trails cut the entire forest from north to south and east to west and are about 200 meters apart.

Permits will cost $100 (excluding transport) and as with all our permits:

• 50% of your permit fee goes to ICCN, the Congolese wildlife authority. ICCN uses this money for funding the management and conservation efforts in all Congolese National Parks.
• 30% of your permit fee is invested by Virunga National Park into community projects. 
These projects include activities such as building schools, health centres, and improving water supplies to local communities.
• 20% of your permit fee goes towards the operational costs of Virunga National Park. 
Operational costs can range from salaries of our rangers who play an invaluable role in the survival of the park, to investment in infrastructure in and around the park which also benefits local communities.

Javier Kakule holds onto baby Shamavu who loves his milk and drank the entire bottle without pausing once.

Gorillas:

• We received a great deal of press this past week on the rescue of the baby gorilla and the problem that poaching seems to be on the rise. MSNBC, National Geographic, The Times London, and many more wrote stories and linked to or site. We are always grateful for the publicity and it’s our hope that more and more people around the world will become aware of the hard work and commitment of the rangers and staff here.
• The baby gorilla, Shamavu is doing well, and has already bonded with his caretakers, Foster and Javier Kakule, who seem to truly care for him as well. I’ve watched this baby wrap his arms around Foster’s neck and kiss him, just like a human child. It brings home the fact of how special these animals are, how like humans, and why we connect with them. If you would like to help support the care of this baby, you can do so to the right of this blog post using the barometer donate button. We do need your support.

Dirk-Jan Vermeij (far right), envoy for the Dutch Embassy Kinshasa, watches the Tongo chimps in the trees.

Tourism

• Dirk-Jan Vermeij, envoy for the Dutch Embassy in Kinshasa, visited Rumangabo to see some of the work they support which includes Tongo and the chimpanzee habituation project run by Frankfurt Zoological Society. Several of our staff joined Dirk-Jan Vermeij to see the chimps for the first time. I went on a chimp trek recently in Tongo and thoroughly enjoyed it. The village of Tongo itself sits on a hillside overlooking a valley of lava flow, the hills where the chimps live, and the Virunga Massif in the background (when it’s clear). It’s beautiful.

View of the Tongo hills sitting on top of an old lava flow where the chimpanzees live. The L-shaped building in the foreground is a school built by the park for the community.

Security

• As we reported last week in a blog post, elephant and hippo continue to come out of the forest and river to raid the cultivated fields in the northern sector near Masambo and the Ugandan border. Significant cassava, maize and banana crops were destroyed, and the owners have filed complaints with the park. Park rangers are working hard to stop the raids.
• The operation in Muramba to clear the area of Mai Mai militia was very successful.  There were armed contacts with militias, but several camps were destroyed, and quite a lot of ammunition was seized from their camps.

Rangers

• The officer training is completed in Mutsora. In all, 26 of our officers were trained to command a platoon, that’s up to about 40 men.  This completes a very important phase in our training.  There is one training session left this year which is for high level officers (a company command, that’s up to about 120 men).

Jean Bosco works with the community to set up dialogue committees.

Community

• Our community liaison, Jean Bosco, held an important meeting in Kiwanja on Friday (a community north of Rumangabo park headquarters) to create some dialogue committees in villages surrounding the park. The goal is to give people a place to discuss problems related to the park, and give the park an opportunity to address issues as well as identify the community’s greatest need. We are committed to establishing better relationships with the local community and believe this is a good place to start.

Misc.

• I was invited to give a presentation at a TEDx gathering in Geneva organised by WWF.  I’m incredibly glad I went, as it was an opportunity to meet some very good people, and an amazingly talented bunch of speakers, all deeply committed to the environment. There was a venture capitalist / physicist committed to resolving the energy crisis, a key member of the London Symphony Orchestra using music to inspire people about the value of nature, and a Sherpa who had twice climbed Everest and a good dozen other Himalayan peaks and was campaigning on global warming.  Puts things in proportion, in our little world.

And…one last photo of baby gorilla Shamavu…

By Gilbert Dilis, Security Officer for Virunga National Park

©The Forgotten Parks

Last Thursday, September 15, we arrived in Tongo under a beating rain, the site of the Virunga chimpanzee project, not open to the public yet. Alexis, the leader of the project, explains the rules to us for when we approach the chimpanzee family, which counts 36 individuals.

View across the valley of the Tongo Hills where the chimps live. The hills look deceptively small. Hiking through the thick old forest can be exhausting if the chimps are on the move. ©The Forgotten Parks

At 8 AM, we begin the trek and penetrate the forest on very accessible paths that the trackers and others in charge created in order to reach as easily as possible the place where the animals are.

It can be a long, hard hike through the thick old forest, but this time we are lucky…they are near. One hears their cries in answer to those of the tracker who announces his presence. However, the chimpanzees appear agitated a little. It is normal, Alexis tells me. With the rain they begin to take their meal later and they are always occupied at eating whereas they should be at rest. But the spectacle is splendid. The chimpanzees jump, climb the trees, and seem finally to be accustomed to our presence. But time is past and it is already time to set out again.

©The Forgotten Parks

My purpose in visiting Tongo was to assess the security situation on the site, which is greatly improved and very good at this moment.  I will be watching it carefully for the next two months, doing reconnaissance around the site and further north. If everything remains calm in the next 6 weeks, we will do test runs with our staff and other candidates. We’re hoping for an opening by mid-December.

The bloodhound dog handlers and guards - part of our new anti-poaching program.

Rangers

• Our bloodhound dogs, handlers, and guards have received quite a workout the last 10 days from Swiss trainer Marlene Zähner and German CSI detective Marcel Maierhofer. We now have a complete team of 6 handlers (one for each of the 6 bloodhounds), plus their guards, all being trained in defense, tactical moves, and crime scene investigation. The handlers have been working with their particular dog in man-trailing…or perhaps I should say that the dogs have been working with the handlers – the dogs seem to know exactly what they are doing. As Marlene says, they’re born with the instinct to do this. I’ve been getting a bit of training as well with Stella, which has been interesting and I can tell you that it takes skill to be a handler. See this blog post about the trip we made to the north of the park with two of the dogs last week.
• Our new Human Resources manager, Fantassin, has been working on getting all the rangers’ widows officially registered. This is the first step in setting up bank accounts and regular payments. Most of these widows will need to be trained in this type of thing as, typically, most have never had a bank account before.

The bar at Mikeno Lodge is finished, but we need a cool name.

Tourism

• I mentioned last week that we are planning a tourism promotion. All of you readers are the first to know. It will be for the month of November, and all permits will be half price, so start planning your trip.
• We also have some news that we’ve been waiting to announce, but I’ll drop you a hint right now. Ready? Visas can be purchased on the tourism website for $50. The first test visitor is arriving today using one of these visas. I’ll let you know how it goes.
• The bar in the lodge made from lava stone is completed. We’re looking for a creative name. If you have any ideas, post it in the comment section below.

Tongo Chimp

Security

• It has been a reasonably quiet week at Virunga for security – always something to be grateful for.
• Our security director, Gilbert, visited Tongo and the chimp project this week to assess the security situation in order to make an informed decision on when to open this up to tourism. He is pleased with what he found and will be watching it closely in the next two months. It seems likely that we will be able to open it up in December before the Christmas holidays.

New Congohound website - for the anti-poaching program that needs funding.

Fundraising and You

• We have a number of dedicated individuals (like many of you) and groups that give monthly, or do special fundraising events. Happy Hollow Zoo is one such group that has supported us for years, and will have a fundraiser on October 1 at their wonderful zoo in San Jose, California. If you live anywhere nearby please plan to go.
• We are beginning to set up individual websites for programs at the park that need funding in order to survive. The first one for our bloodhound anti-poaching, called Congohounds, is almost ready to launch. Look for this and others in the coming week.
• We asked for used cameras recently, and now have six donated cameras in our hands and already moving out to the field with rangers and other staff. Thank you so much! More are on the way in October and November.

And finally, a Facebook fan wrote this recently about his visit to the park. It’s great to hear this kind of praise:

From Michael Valigore: “My girlfriend and I were in the park for a week in the end of July to trek the volcano and visit the gorillas. We got our visa last minute from Greg at Amahoro Tours in Rwanda www.amahoro-tours.com. While the cost of the visa nearly kept us from going, the park was THE highlight of our 4.5 months in Africa.”

Visa issues will hopefully be a thing of the past.

Chimp Habituation in Tongo

By Radu Dumitraşcu/The Forgotten Parks, Frankfurt Zoological Society

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“Habituate” is a common word used around Virunga, but many of our readers don’t know what this word means or how the habituation process works. Simply put, the word means getting wild animals used to being around people. Virunga, for instance, has habituated gorillas and non-habituated gorillas. The chimpanzees of Tongo (west of park headquarters) have been hunted for the past two decades, making the habituation process that began a year ago quite difficult.

“At the beginning of the habituation process, they were so scared of us. When they saw us they would run away as fast as they could without making any noise or without communicating with each other, “ explains Alexis Mutakirwa , our Chimpanzee Habituation Officer. “All they wanted was to get away from us.”

Habituation of an animal is a psychological process that involves frequent and prolonged exposure to people. Initially, habituating chimpanzees had been used for research, but The Forgotten Parks began the process to enable chimp tourism in Tongo, a potentially significant source of revenue for the park and conservation in Virunga.

Alexis and Radu discussing chimp habituation in Tongo.

A Little History
Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) first habituated the chimps in Tongo in the late 1980’s. During that time, there was no other area where chimpanzees had been habituated for tourism without the use of artificial inducement, such as food or reproduced chimpanzee calls. Although chimp habituation is much easier to do when it involves providing food, FZS did not employ this tactic as it could lead to behavioral change and it establishes a rapport between chimpanzees and humans that is based on dependency.

For three years chimp tourism in Tongo was vibrant and functional with revenue benefiting both the park and the community around Tongo.  However, in 1993, civil unrest came to the DRC and forced FZS to pull out of Tongo for two decades, putting a halt to chimp tourism.

BILLBOARD IN TONGO: “Together we protect the chimps and the forest”

Starting Over with Chimp Habituation
In September 2009 Frankfurt Zoological Society was able to return to Tongo and Alexis and his team of trekkers re-initiated the chimp habituation process starting with the re-opening of 80 km of trails in the dense Tongo forest to allow easy access to the chimps. The trails cut the entire forest from north to south and east to west; trails are about 200 meters apart. Alexis and his team then conducted a thorough animal census in the forest and they found about 30 chimpanzees, almost half of the number of chimps that were first habituated in the 1980’s. The civil wars, instability, and poaching took a toll on the chimp population.

In June 2010, the actual re-habituation process started. Waking up before sunset, Alexis and his team would go into the forest being careful to be extremely silent as they approached the chimps. Once they reached the chimps, they would surround them, covering the entire area where the animals had nested for the night. They used specific sounds and submission gestures. The trekkers did this every day for an entire year. Gradually the chimps became more familiar with human presence and at one point stopped running away.

“We noticed that some of the older chimps remained calm when we approached them. They were the same chimps that were habituated in late 1980’s. The younger ones saw that and adopted the same behavior. This definitely made our work easier,” explains Alexis.

In April 2011 Alexis and his team began to take people other than trekkers into the forest so they could get used to all types of people with different skin color. The chimps are now fully habituated, comfortable with human presence and are now ready to welcome tourists. The trekkers will continue to monitor the health of the chimpanzees and educate the local people of the importance of having this community of chimps in the Tongo forest.

The chimp habituation project is part of The Forgotten Parks initiative. Chimp conservation and chimp tourism can benefit both the local population and the park’s wildlife. The Forgotten Parks strives to prove the importance of wildlife as a natural resource and decrease the population’s dependency on the forest. This initiative reflects FZS’ comprehensive approach to nature conservation; we nurture a harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship between the forgotten parks of the DRC and its people.

TONGO. The word feels like Africa, like jungles, like monkeys, and surprisingly that’s very close to reality in Virunga National Park. Tongo is a small 300-year-old forest that sits on top of a lava flow from Nyamulagira Volcano and is home to a small population of wild chimpanzees.

Back in 1987, the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), a partner of the park, developed a network of trails through the four distinct hills of Tongo, and habituated the chimpanzees for tourism. Civil unrest put an end to tourism, but in the summer of 2010, FZS re-launched the habituation process with a dedicated team of Community Trackers who have spent the last 11 months finding the chimps and spending the day with them in order to make them comfortable with a human presence.  By this summer, tourists will once again have the chance to see chimps in the wild.

Tongo sits to the northwest of Virunga Park headquarters of Rumangabo. Read the full story »

Security remained a concern this past week as we kept a close eye on Mai Mai militia in the central sector and FDLR in the Nyamulagira volcano sector.

Security:

A team of rangers and staff began the logistical planning for an operation against the FDLR charcoal trade in the forest.

• We have been preparing an operation against the FDLR illegal charcoal trade in the Nyamulagira volcano sector following the attack on our patrol a week ago that killed one of our rangers. Although it appears that the activity is still minimal compared to 2009, it’s important that we strengthen security in this area, and crucial that we show a determination to end the destruction of the forests.
• A Mai Mai militia movement around Lake Edward continues to pose a threat to park operations, local people, and wildlife. We learned this week of a small Mai Mai base newly established on the Rwindi River near Lake Edward and north of our central-sector headquarters at Rwindi. The main activity of Mai Mai rebels comprises poaching and providing security (at a cost) to illegal fishermen and farmers inside the park. However, they also steal property from the local population, as they did in Lunyasenge this week.
• In the region where a small group of eastern lowland gorillas live, near the Virunga ranger post in Tshchabirimu, a new Mai Mai presence on the border has been threatening local villagers. Read the full story »

Suena and Poplap - the 2 subadult chimps that were seized in January after being found in filthy conditions in Goma withi nsufficient food and water - are thriving in their new surroundings at the Lwiro Primate Rehabilitation Centre near Bukavu.

Suena & Poplap are now inseparable - a truly joyous friendship has developed

Suena & Poplap were moved to Lwiro back in April, after a massive effort by
the Gorilla Doctors, ICCN and others to get these chimps to a better
place after they were abandoned by their keepers along with 3 other chimps
and 2 monkeys. I was in Lwiro on Tuesday this week - and was just amazed to
see how changed both chimps were.

Read the full story »