Category: Animals
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How Human are Gorillas?
Researchers are often struck by gorillas’ apparent humanity. Taking into account our genetic similarities of 95% or above, there has been a long debate about how close humans and gorillas really are. George Schaller — one of the world’s most preeminent field biologists —travelled to the Virunga Volcanoes in the 1960s, at age 26, to…
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Dawn of Gorilla Tracking as a Tourism Activity
While there were sporadic non-scientific expeditions to mountain gorillas before, real tourism began with the arrival of Walter Baumgartel. Baumgartel was a German who had lived in South Africa, helped the British with reconnaissance photography during World War II, and eventually found an enticing ad in London: they were looking for somebody interested in a…
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The Battle of the Great Apes: Gorillas versus Chimpanzees
When I learned I was going to do an internship in Uganda for six months, I immediately started researching the country and its highlights. Naturally, one of the first things that came up was gorilla tracking. I remember opening the page, scrolling through it and getting excited, until I saw the price tag and realised…
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Ancient Relic
500mm, 1/640s, f/5, ISO250 Believe it or not, this is one of the region’s stars – at least for avid bird-watchers. The shoebill (sometimes known as the whale-headed stork) is a particularly prehistoric-looking bird found in swamps and wetlands throughout central Africa, but because of habitat destruction and hunting there are only between 5000 and…
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What Do Gorillas Think of Face Masks?
Hello, my dears? Are you still there? For me, I am still with you, trust me! The reason why you haven’t heard from me for a while is that I was busy busy busy working with two different TV crews. They wanted to capture the best of Volcanoes National Park — and when you work…
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Complex Social Lives of Mountain Gorillas (Including Sex)
Who Can Be a Silverback? A silverback is an adult male gorilla, typically over 12 years old and named for the distinctive patch of silver hair on his back. They have large canine teeth that come with maturity. Silverbacks are the strong, dominant troop leaders but not all have this position; some may have never…
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Three-in-One
200mm, 1/400s, f/8, ISO250 What do I mean by that title? Well, to me, this image tells three different stories, which is always useful for a professional photographer like myself. The first is perhaps the most obvious: this is a tree-climbing lion, which is a relatively rare sight (though not in Ishasha, part of Queen…
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Giraffe Gyrations
145mm, 1/250s, f/5, ISO400 Rwanda’s mountain gorillas understandably steal much of the country’s headlines as far as wildlife tourism goes. But Akagera National Park in the country’s east is a wonderful experience of the more “typical” kind with plenty of the usual suspects: giraffes, buffaloes, elephants, zebras, lions and rhinos (though the latter two can…
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King Kong vs. Gentle Gorilla
As the Godzilla vs. Kong movie opens globally tomorrow, let us investigate why people got gorillas so wrong initially, and how they started to realise the mistake. History of Gorilla Fantasies While Batwa “Pygmies” had coexisted with mountain gorillas in the rainforests of central Africa since time immemorial, the rest of the world took quite a bit longer.…
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