Mountain gorilla

Where is your next adventure or where do you want your next adventure to be?

Well, I'm very lucky.

I've just been invited by the Rwandan government to go out and be part of their annual naming ceremony for the mountain gorillas.

So they've asked me to name a gorilla.

So that's the next big trip.

African motorsport for quite some time, the FIA African Rally Championship.

And so this, so this really has to be, does it not, the Mountain Gorilla-

Mm

...

The first article is entitled In the Gorilla's Midst, M-I-D-S-T.

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 the pandemic spread around the world, Zikusoka, who serves as executive director of conservation through public health, an organization dedicated to protecting mountain gorillas, instructed anyone who came close to the primates to wear masks.

Ultimately, not one gorilla tested positive for COVID-19, and masks also reduced the interspecies transmission of influenza.

Uh, the massive apes were sent then to a zoological museum in Berlin, where Professor Paul Matschie confirmed it as a new species.

Uh, the animal's former Latin name is Gorilla beringei beringei.

That's confusing.

Beringei beringei.

The first article is entitled In the Gorilla's Midst, M-I-D-S-T.

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 the pandemic spread around the world, Zikusoka, who serves as executive director of conservation through public health, an organization dedicated to protecting mountain gorillas, instructed anyone who came close to the primates to wear masks.

Ultimately, not one gorilla tested positive for COVID-19, and masks also reduced the interspecies transmission of influenza.

And I was only about 27 at the time.

And the film producer, Jane Mary Franklin, really taught me how to start telling things really simply to the general public and as i've gone along when we founded our non-profit conservation through public health in 2003 i realized the value of storytelling in raising support for our work not only from the local communities and the government but from people outside uganda and the general public even within uganda but you know donors and people outside the country um and national geographic since i became an explorer in 2018 they've really taught us storytelling, the importance of storytelling, because it can really change the world.

And it actually inspired me also to write a book about my conservation journey called Walking with Gorillas.

And that was an experience in storytelling.

I had to stop being just a scientist, but get my science easily understood by everybody.