ABSTRACT
In November 2009 I was making a field visit with Sosthène Habumuremyi, a Rwandan Ph.D. student who I was supervising. As we proceeded into the forest, I realized I was completely out of breath for two reasons. First, I was hiking uphill on a muddy trail at 10,000 feet altitude in the Virunga Volcanoes of Rwanda. Second, I was excited because I was going to see a gorilla that I hadn’t seen in 17 years—Bwenge, the dominant silverback of a gorilla group monitored by the Karisoke Research Center of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. The very first time I saw Bwenge was the day after he was born in March 1990, only two months after I started my initial field work on gorillas. It was quite a thrill to discover a new baby gorilla, safely tucked away in his mother’s arms, and he quickly became one of my favorite infants. His name means “intelligent” in the Kinyarwandan language. Unfortunately I hadn’t been able to see Bwenge since I finished my Ph.D. field work in 1992. Despite wanting to continue research at Karisoke, it wasn’t possible due to the war, genocide, and political instability that wreaked havoc on the region through the 1990s. I resumed collaborative research with Karisoke in 1998, but on projects involving analysis of their long-term database, which didn’t justify getting past the tight restrictions on visiting the gorillas.
