AT FRANCEVILLE AIRPORT, in south-east Gabon, the terminal building is chaotic with passengers pushing and shoving for baggage. It’s a relief when a tall American approaches and takes my bag. Paul Telfer is a primatologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the project manager for the Batéké Plateau National Park.

Standing next to him is a slim, long-haired woman in jeans – Liz Pearson, the director of The Aspinall Foundation’s gorilla reintroduction programme in Gabon. She’s quiet with a shy smile, and has deep bite and scratch marks all over her bare arms. Later, she’ll say that, after a decade spent cloistered in the forest with gorillas, she’s ‘lost the habit of human small talk’. When I get there, I understand why.

I have travelled to Gabon to visit her pioneer-ing project. Getting to my final destination will involve a bone-shaking, five-hour journey in a 4x4, packed with fuel, wood and food supplies, across savanna and forest to the Mpassa River. There, we’ll unload the vehicle, pile everything into a motorised pirogue and chug upstream for three hours. Dense foliage and thick lianas line the banks and, under the water, snout-nosed crocodiles and pythons will lurk. An hour in, lightning will crack and thunder will rumble, and we’ll sit huddled, heads on knees, as the skies open and a tropical storm beats down.

But first, Paul, Liz and I head to Moanda Airfield and clamber into a four-seater Cessna to get a glimpse of the remote gorilla camp from the air. Soon, we’re flying over dense forest and a diminutive collection of wooden buildings close to the banks of the Mpassa River comes into view. Somewhere in the trees beneath us, two groups of rehabituated gorillas are roaming free.

Back in 1998, Liz made this same flight to scout out the right kind of primary forest in which to establish the gorilla project. She was accompanied by Mike Fay, an explorer and biologist employed by WCS. He is renowned for having carried out the ‘Megatransect’ – a 14-month trek across the Congo Basin – which resulted in him persuading Gabon’s president, Omar Bongo, to sign 13 national parks into existence.

On that first reconnoitre, Liz and Mike identified a 170 000-hectare setting, isolated from humans and rich in wildlife and vegetation. It was perfect for their purposes. On one side of the river, a human camp could be placed; on the other, the gorillas could be released.

The reserve was the dream of the late John Aspinall, a British millionaire who founded two private zoos (now wild animal parks) in the UK – Howletts and Port Lympne. Both are renowned for returning species to the wild, including Przewalski’s horses, Cape buffaloes and pythons. He also wanted to bring gorillas back to the forest and visited the site in 1998. ‘I flew over it for an hour and I was beguiled by its beauty, its remoteness,’ he is reported as saying. ‘I saw no human habitation for miles, just animals. I knew it was ideal for a sanctuary.’

There were no gorillas here then – half a century ago there would have been a wild population but, as in so much of the Congo Basin, they had been hunted to extinction. Conservationists say the western lowland gorilla and the Central African chimpanzee are on the cusp of extermination, with the bushmeat trade, logging industry and Ebola virus the main threats to their survival.

That evening, Liz and I go out for pizza in Franceville. ‘It’s hard to find a restaurant here that doesn’t serve bushmeat,’ she says. The neighbouring establishment is offering gibier (crocodile), python and duiker. Despite the fact that hunting is a major problem, endangering Gabon’s precious wildlife, bushmeat remains the meal of choice for the Gabonese.

Over a bottle of Regab, the locally brewed beer, I get a sense of Liz’s dedication to gorilla conservation. Before becoming director of the project in Gabon, she worked with orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute, and then at another Aspinall Foundation gorilla-release project in the Republic of Congo, where orphan gorillas were released at the Lésio-Louna Reserve.

‘I was there for the first transfer of orphans, but three out of the five died of amoebas. It was horribly depressing, the failure of it,’ she says. In 2006, however, two reintroduced apes there became the second and third gorillas to produce offspring.

When civil war broke out in Congo in 1997, Liz was part of a rescue operation to save animals in the Brazzaville Zoo but, when gunshots started coming through her apartment walls, she was forced to evacuate to Libreville.

The next evening, after our long 4x4 and river journey, we reach the gorilla pro-ject camp. ‘We’re home,’ says Liz. ‘Home’ is a wooden kitchen hut with an adjoining study containing a satellite phone and computers on which data on the gorilla groups is logged each day. There are mosquito-screened huts for Liz and her colleague, Paul Aczel (responsible for the park’s protection) and a shower block fed with water from the river. There are also huts for four gorilla trackers and six eco-guards, who patrol the forests and savanna. They’ve got the forest marked out into blocks using GPS mapping, and every day Liz and the trackers go out and observe the gorillas’ ranging behaviour.

Her day starts at 05h30. She makes coffee, checks e-mails and then heads downriver with the trackers. ‘Some days it only takes 10 minutes to find the gorillas,’ she says. ‘Other days we use walkie-talkies and walk for hours.’

I have never been anywhere so remote in my life. As darkness falls, the tropical night strikes up with a thousand insect and animal sounds that rise and fall like an orchestra: the heavy percussion gloop gloop of a frog, the piping of a forest bird, the maracas-like buzz of crickets, the soprano whoop of monkeys. It’s an astonishingly soothing blanket of primeval sounds.

I can’t hear them, but somewhere on the other side of the Mpassa River, sleeping in branches in the trees, are two gorilla groups. The first, known as Marco’s group (after the dominant male), was released in 1998 and the 16 gorillas in it range in age from nine to

14 years. Kwibi’s group was released in 2003, and is made up of 11 gorillas, which range in age from six to 10 years.

Many of these gorillas began life in tragic circumstances; all of them are lucky to be alive. The project started with four orphans rescued in Libreville: Marco, Sophie, Lekedi and Moanda. Moanda, a bushmeat orphan, was just a month old when she was found. Totally bald like a human baby, she had only two teeth and weighed less than a kilogram.

Over the next year, these gorillas were joined by others: Ndjima’s mother had been caught in a snare and was found by hunters four days later, her foot left behind in the trap. ‘She’d either chewed or pulled it off and she was dead,’ says Liz. ‘Ndjima was seven months old, dehydrated and clinging to her mother’s dead body.’

Kongo came from a zoo in Port Gentil. ‘He was a year old, in a very bad state. He lay on the floor, staring upwards. He had machete scars on his head,’ Liz recalls. When the gorilla project boat arrived to pick them up at the edge of the forest, the propeller hit a log in the water and they were forced to climb out and walk in the dark. ‘Kongo was terrified. He kept clinging to me, then biting. When I put him down, he’d want to come back up. I ended up with my left breast and arm covered in blood,’ says Liz.

Boumango was found abandoned in a tree by hunters. His family, they said, had left him behind. Liz suspects his family was killed by the hunters. ‘Gorillas don’t abandon their young. I’ve seen gorilla mothers carry dead infants for three days,’ she says. Establishing an attachment quickly with young gorillas is crucial. ‘Emotionally, gorillas are very sensitive. If we don’t develop a bond, they won’t eat. The light goes out in their eyes and they die,’ says Liz.

aving worked with the release project in Congo, Liz was determined to learn as much as she could and try another approach. ‘In Congo they bring them up in one area and then dart and translocate them to the reserve where they are going to live. Here, it is different. The gorillas start in the area they are going to live in, so they grow up in familiar surroundings.’

She will never forget the sound Kongo made when he was put across the river. ‘He gave a cry I’d never heard before,’ she says. ‘It was a hollow call, like he was glad to see the forest again, but I think he was also calling for his family.’ At the start, Kongo was so traumatised by his zoo experience that he didn’t mix with other gorillas. ‘They would go up to him and try to hand him leaves,’ says Liz.

The gorillas are ‘put across the river’ when they are weaned and old enough to fend for themselves. ‘The hardest part is letting them go,’ says Liz. ‘When I put Moanda across, I could hear her cry. It’s like kicking birds out of the nest. She was the first one I let go like that. I’m tougher now – altogether, I’ve let 13 go.’

Now entirely independent, Marco’s group is roaming across an 11-square-kilometre area. In October 2007, Liz was able to report that the project had produced its first young. The first baby born to reintroduced gorillas in Gabon arrived to parents Marco (14) and Lekedi (12). The baby was named Okeli, a local word that means ‘a stream that leads to bigger things’. In August 2008, Ntsege was born, and in February 2009, a third baby arrived.

Kwibi’s group, released in 2003, differs from Marco’s because six of the members were born in captivity at Howletts Wild Animal Park. It is the first time that this type of wholesale reintroduction had been attempted. Although not physically and psychologically harmed like the older group, these zoo-born babies presented an entirely different challenge.

‘They had been brought up in cages, so they were scared to death when they first saw the forest. They didn’t like its sounds and they panicked at the sight of a dung beetle!’ says Liz. ‘Plus they had to get used to different food, not the zoo fodder they liked. There, it was lychees, now it was salad leaves they had to gather themselves.’

When the gorillas arrived, they were fed milk, bananas and cereal and put to sleep across the river in cages made from branches and leaves. ‘We’d take them into the forest each day, spend all day with them and bring them back at five. It was guided exploration. We were surrogate parenting,’ Liz says. ‘I was worried in the beginning that they’d eat something poisonous, but it’s been okay. They’ve eaten things that didn’t agree with them, but no disasters. To start, we showed them a very limited menu – such as the cocoa leaf and afrimomo, a plant similar to wild ginger, which they love.’

These ‘British’ apes had to be given malaria tablets and other medication. ‘It’s the same process when a Westerner comes to live in Africa, it takes time to build up immunities,’ says Liz. To monitor their health, a vet was based at the camp for the first two years. Sadly, not all the apes survived. One died from appendicitis and another succumbed to a parasite-related intestinal infection. It was yet another lesson for Liz about the vulner-ability of this sensitive species.

The gorillas in Kwibi’s group are now aged six to 10, living autonomously in the forest and ranging over a three-kilometre area. As they mature, their range will increase. ‘They are going through the adolescent phase right now,’ says Liz. ‘They get very excited and have sugar rushes. They’re a real handful.’ She tracks them regularly, but says they can get overenthusiastic in their joy to see her. ‘The older ones want me to play and tend to show it by biting and scratching. However, the two youngest will nap on my lap for 15 minutes or so.’

Liz employs imitative gorilla sounds to reassure them. ‘They cough to show they’re not happy. I know all the noises, but gorillas don’t vocalise that much and there are a lot of subtleties we don’t know about. I never want to “say” too much in case I’m speaking the wrong words.’

It’s an obvious comparison, so Liz smiles when asked if she compares herself to Dian Fossey, the scientist synonymous with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. ‘I think the only reason people might say something to that effect is because Fossey was most recognised by the international media as working with gorillas,’ says Liz. ‘There are hundreds of dedicated people working in various capacities to save great apes and other endangered species throughout the world. I’m just so fortunate to be involved in the process.’

Following the successful birth of Okeli, Liz is now embarking on more surrogate parenting. In July last year, three young gorillas were flown from Howletts to Gabon, where they’ll become part of a third group to be reintroduced to the wild. They also made history as they included five-month-old Tiya, the youngest gorilla ever to be transferred for reintroduction. The gorillas were transported on a private jet courtesy of Richard Branson to Libreville, where they boarded a presidential helicopter bound for the forest camp.

They were accompanied by Damian Aspinall, son of John, and the Foundation’s overseas director, Amos Courage. ‘They will be taken out into in the forest each day and in a few years they will be ready for life in the jungle,’ said Damian. ‘My father would have been overjoyed to know that we are able to continue his work in conservation, breeding and the reintroduction of endangered species such as the western lowland gorilla.’

Admittedly, this gorilla reintroduction project is a small dent in a big problem, with primatologists gloomily predicting that ecological extinction is a real possibility for gorillas in the next few decades. In the meantime, though, the new generation of gorillas born here – Okeli, Ntsege and the newest one yet to be named – are thriving, and a moving example of what can be achieved with sufficient care.

For more information, visit www.totallywild.net. For an earlier perspective on The Aspinall Foundation’s work in Gabon, read Amos Courage’s ‘Orphaned!’ in the March 2003 issue of Africa Geographic.

Wholesale Preservation

Some conservationists are critical of single-species reintroduction programmes, such as this project, arguing that it is better to look after large chunks of land and all the interrelated species living there. Since the start, The Aspinall Foundation has championed the need for wholesale ecosystem preservation at the Batéké Plateau National Park, where the gorilla project is located. Here, the foundation is managing the 170 000-hectare reserve in association with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Ministry of Water and Forests, and is funding the training, equipping and salaries of a team of six eco-guards. The biodiversity of the park and its periphery is seriously threatened by Congolese and Gabonese poachers, who target duikers, red river hogs, apes, elephants and forest buffaloes.

Paul Aczel is responsible for park protection and manages the team of guards. He recalls his horror two years ago at finding an elephant massacre at Jobo Bai – a mineral-rich forest clearing in the forest that attracts animals. Tragically, the bai attracts hunters too. Says Paul, ‘The elephants had been stripped of their tusks and the hunters had taken away as much meat as they could carry.’

Now, however, poachers have become wary of hunting in the park thanks to the uniformed guards who patrol on a daily basis, travelling by motorised pirogue and quad bike. They have also carried out awareness campaigns in the Congo and Gabonese villages around the park. ‘In the two years we’ve been focusing on this, I’ve seen much more wildlife and so many more elephant trails,’ says Paul. ‘Before, the hunters were everywhere, now our presence has made them think twice.’

‘It’s great progress,’ he continues, ‘but we can’t be everywhere at once. Ideally, we’d like a team of 15 eco-guards. Then we’d to be able to cover the whole territory and we’d really see the animal populations soar again.’ n