Bwindi Impenetrable Forest

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of them were in Bwindi.

And they had very, there was very little, I was a little concerned that the habitat had been cut, their forest home had been cut.

We could easily make them sick.

And we've been donating to our causes.

But they

do have friends in Bwindi, many friends who are footballers as well.

And we started the Bwindi Kids League

Yeah.

Then you bike to Bwindi, where all the mountain gorillas are, and then you cross the whole national park on foot, uh, et cetera, all the way to, uh, another, uh, like the last national park where you cycle through, and that's where you find elephants, lions, uh.

So you have a support car where you can hop in if the lions, uh, get a bit too close-

What a actual if, Jan.

To keep Uganda's mountain gorillas healthy, Gladys Kalema Zikusoka is starting with their neighbors first.

In spring 2020, as COVID-19 erupted worldwide, Gladys Kalema Zikusoka feared less for her own health than for the mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, 120 square miles of misty rainforest in Uganda's southwest corner.

Around 40,000 tourists visit Bwindi annually, bearing pathogens from around the world.

In 2009, a pair of Rwandan gorillas died from a respiratory virus likely transmitted by a tourist, and Kalema Zikusoka, a Ugandan wildlife veterinarian, knew that the coronavirus posed an even greater threat.

A lot of tourists are so excited to see gorillas that they won't tell you that they're sick, she says.

As a child growing up in Uganda, she adopted stray dogs and established a wildlife club.

She eventually moved to London for veterinary school.

In 1994, she visited Bwindi to conduct summer research on gorillas, creatures that had fascinated her since childhood.

I was young.

I was just finishing my undergraduate, and I went out to the Bwindi Forest in Uganda and got a chance to study mountain gorillas.

And that changed the course of my life.

I mean, I'm sitting up here now.

And I love not being tempted to zoom in and fill the frame all the time.

I love a gorilla relaxing on a tree branch with the entire Bwindi National Park behind it.

Birds are a little bit different.

Like they tend to really showcase themselves and you can showcase them best when you're getting the detail on the plumage, when you're getting the color and the contrast.

Their habitat was disappearing.

There were only about 650 gorillas left in the world and only about 300 in Bwindi.

And I could see that we could get really close to them and make them sick.

And I decided to become a full-time wildlife vet straight away and convince the director of Uganda National Parks to hire me as their first vet.

And she said, yes, low income groups of people in Uganda get preventable diseases like scabies because of inadequate hygiene.

So that was very important for me because I was able to get a bottle of ivermectin.

and drive the 10-hour journey to Bwindi.

And when we got there, I was with a vet from Kenya Wildlife Service who was helping to set up the vet unit there.

And I remember my worst story was I sent a crew out to look for the gorillas deep into the rainforest.

Eight hours west by road from the Ugandan capital Kampala is the impenetrable forest of Bwindi.

Windy is one of the few places where the mountain gorilla still survives.

Tracking parties stay in small settlements in the heart of the forest.

And he, with his orange mohican, you know, he's a very intelligent guy and a great entertainer, compulsive entertainer, can't help adopting the Johnny Rotten persona.

But the producer was saying, as he was watching a female crossing a trail just in front of him in Windy, and deep in that moment, the producer asked him to say something.

Because he was just, you know, in a moment with a...

That's like a natural