Travellers Tale

The critically endangered western lowland gorilla makes its home in the dense marantaceae forests of Central Africa. Journalist Tom Downey joins two experts on a quest to meet these great apes, and understand the ongoing research into one of humanity’s closest cousins.

Spanish primatologist Magdalena Bermejo has spent much of the last 25 years deep in the jungles of the Republic of Congo, where her research into the behaviour of western lowland gorillas has led her to become a world authority on the subspecies. Found only in Central Africa, this gorilla (a subspecies of the western gorilla) is separated by around a million years of evolution from the mountain gorillas commonly seen by tourists in Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC, on the other side of the Congo Basin (who themselves are a subspecies of the eastern gorilla).

We are about to go on a morning trek to try and find a habituated group of these apes, which live in the thick marantaceae (arrowroot) forests that surround Ngaga Camp, situated in the Republic of Congo’s Odzala-Kokoua National Park. Ngaga is one of three camps run by the Congo Conservation Company. As dawn breaks and the light fog lifts, we sip coffee on the terrace of the main building, which is nestled in the middle of the park, surrounded by just a handful of luxurious cottages and then nothing but thick forest teeming with gorillas.

Bermejo grabs a coffee and comes over to sit with us and prepare us for the trek. “The tracker you will have today, Zepherin, has been incredibly important in the research I’ve done,” she says. “Without someone like him, someone who really understands these animals,

I would never have learned so much.” This means a lot coming from Bermejo, the world expert on this gorilla, and leads me to think about trackers in a different way than I ever have before. Zepherin, a slight, mostly silent middle-aged man, promptly leads us down a steep dirt road. After walking for about 20 minutes, he turns into the forest, following a narrow dirt trail. “We think of trackers as people who just follow the signs,” Bermejo said. “Actually there is much more to it than that: It’s about how they are thinking. Good trackers are using sophisticated reasoning and probability calculations. They may move in one direction but they also have many possible hypotheses in mind if their first, or second, or third ideas for where the animals are don’t pan out. There’s something magical that happens when they do this well. They’re thinking so fast. They’re not even looking at the ground. And they are absolutely concentrated on locating these animals, to the exclusion of everything else.”

For our small group of visitors following Zepherin, the jungle is vast, seemingly impenetrable and almost inscrutable. The marantaceae is so thick in most directions that you can only really see a few feet off the trail. But Zepherin moves swiftly, pausing to look around and listen, before decisively leading us along one of two branches of the track. “For people like you, who don’t know the forest, it’s hard to see all the signs and possibilities I see. I start from what I know: Where we left this group of gorillas yesterday,” he says. “I have some ideas where they may be today. But now we will test those ideas after I examine all the signs and the sounds.” With that explanation he is off into the deep green and dark brown of the forest, carefully cutting marantaceae stalks using gardener’s clippers (the sound of a machete frightens the animals) to clear the way. He motions for us to put on our masks, which will help protect the gorillas from any diseases or infections we carry. Zepherin moves easily through the thick growth. We slow him down, clumsily squeezing between trees, hoping to spot the gorillas but with no idea how to find them.

We scurry behind him, scanning the treetops, still with no clue as to what led him to exit the trail here in the first place. “Listen,” he says. “That little sound of movement in the trees. That has to be our group. If they weren’t, they would have run away by now.” He gestures to us to stay low and then quietly and carefully starts to clip away a swath of marantaceae so that we can see much further into the upper reaches of the jungle. He points to the top of a tree about 50 metres distant and then we too see it, an enormous silverback suspended in the air, hugging a tree trunk with one arm. At first the gorilla seems oblivious to us, munching on leaves with his free hand, gazing down at his progeny who, we now see, are playing in the lower branches of the same tree. But then the animal stops daintily picking at his morning meal, jerks his giant head up, and starts to rapidly descend the tree trunk. He climbs down surprisingly swiftly for an animal that must be over 400 pounds, and is off the tree and onto the ground in just a few seconds.

A chorus of pounding chests echoes through the forest, the kind of primal sound you may never have heard in the wild before but can immediately identify. The babies and lone adult female who were relaxing below now follow him down the tree and away into the darkness of the jungle. Zepherin, who was sitting on a log as we watched the action above, now gets up slowly and looks in the direction of the sounds. “They’re moving away from us now,” he says. “But we know they still want to eat. So I have an idea of which direction they will move in based on what fruits are ripe and ready around here.”

Zepherin began his career as a hunter at the age of 12. It’s easy to romanticise that life, especially since it allowed him to take up his current job, which is both prestigious and well compensated. But the reality, of course, is a little different. “My father had three children,” he says. “He needed me to hunt alongside my big brother. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay in school. They said I had to hunt, but I didn’t agree with that.” Zepherin started to learn at the side of his brother, hunting red river hogs, duikers, and monkeys. A few years later he was able to hunt on his own, sometimes spending all night in the forest, following tracks for many, many hours until finally he could bring home a hog to eat or sell.

Bermejo has some theories about what allowed Zepherin to succeed in that career, and the one that followed as a tracker. “For many of us, the stakes aren’t that high. If we don’t succeed, we find something else to do,” she says. “But for someone like Zepherin, when he started as a hunter as a child, he had to succeed or his family wouldn’t eat. That kind of pressure makes you learn to really focus: To listen, to be still, to rapidly and correctly interpret what’s going on around you. That kind of absolutely intense focus is something you do because you need to survive. You can’t just order a pizza if it doesn’t work out.”

Bermejo didn’t, at first, understand the mental intricacies of tracking and how much it had taught Zepherin about the behaviour of the animals she’s spent her life studying. “One day we were out observing a group of gorillas and I was talking to another researcher about the behaviours we were seeing. Zepherin interrupted us and he said, ‘I don’t think that’s correct. There’s another gorilla way over there on the side, and their behaviour was actually in reaction to him.’” She realised he was right—and from then on started to press him for details of how he tracked the animals, how to interpret their behaviour, and what mental processes he used to do those things.

“I’ve learned so much from the way he works,” she says. “We think of focus as this intense, frenzied thing, but really to focus is to be calm, to see and listen to everything around you, to be open to new evidence, and to be willing to change your ideas based on what you observe. That’s what these trackers are doing all the time.” What she also realised as she tried to document his decision-making process, was that he wasn’t simply juggling a couple of ideas about where the animals might be; he was going through a set of many complex, and often almost intuitive probability calculations in his mind, rapidly trying his best hypothesis, and then discarding that and moving on if it didn’t work.

As Zepherin pauses, listens again, and tries to deduce where the gorillas have now moved to, a swarm of sweat bees – small, stingless creatures that are drawn to human sweat – start to land all over our bodies. I frantically swipe at them to get them away. But Zepherin remains still as a rock, focused completely on the task at hand. He leads us back onto a trail so we can move faster and try to catch the group we saw earlier. After a few minutes’ walk, he points to a few slightly folded-over stalks of marantaceae high above us that I would never have noticed if he hadn’t pointed them out. “I think the group came through here,” he says, and leads us off-trail again, deep into the marantaceae.

After a few short forays in a couple of different directions, he hears something, tells us to wait and be quiet, and then starts to clear a vista for us once again. Now we spot three tiny apes frolicking in the treetops, tentatively swinging from branch to branch, their mothers watching from below. We settle in to observe, photograph, and enjoy our time in the midst of these creatures. Later, on the walk back to the camp, Zepherin tells us about his approach to tracking: “In the work of the forest, you need to work with your head,” he says. “The eyes and the ears also, of course, but most importantly the brain.”

About 15 years ago, Zepherin and Bermejo were both witness to an Ebola outbreak that, in addition to killing humans, also devastated the gorillas they were following at that time. An estimated 5,000 apes died in Gabon and the Republic of the Congo. “We saw behaviour then that we had never seen before or after,” Bermejo says. “Normally when an ape dies they don’t stay for a long time with the body. But in this case, because so many of them were dying, they knew something was different and very wrong. They stayed for days with the bodies. We could see that they were so sad.”

At that point Zepherin and Bermejo had been working together for about six years. “The gorillas we had followed for so long were just dying in front of us,” Zepherin says. “Madame was crying. It was very sad.” After the loss of so many of the gorillas in their research population, Bermejo, along with Zepherin and German Illera, her husband and fellow researcher, decided to move from the stricken research area (the Lossi Sanctuary) to their current base (Ngaga Camp), and they have been here ever since.

Part of what is special about visiting the camp is hearing those kinds of stories first-hand, from the researchers themselves. Research and tourism are very closely aligned here, in a way that is different from almost everywhere else in Africa where you can see gorillas. What that means for visitors is that Bermejo, considered the Dian Fossey of western lowland gorilla research, isn’t just out every morning observing these gorillas on her own; she also talks to the guests, often dines with them, and shares the insights into ape behaviour she’s gained over more than two decades working in the area. “The way that this camp and this research is structured is quite different from most places,” she says. “The research and the tourism go hand in hand. The tourism helps to support the research. We researchers want to help the tourists who visit to understand what they see in a deeper way.” In fact the non-profit that underwrites the research, SPAC (Sabine Plattner African Charities) is run by the same family who also run the Congo Conservation Company.

One night Bermejo opens her laptop and shows us some footage that she’s captured on the many video camera traps that are now scattered across this gorilla habitat. “These cameras allow us to see many things we can’t see when we track,” she says, “namely the behaviour of groups that are not habituated, and what happens at night. They’re a powerful research tool.” Periodically Bermejo sits down with Zepherin and has him watch the most interesting snippets of video. “It’s amazing,” she says. “I studied animal behaviour almost all my life. In school. In the field. But often he will take a look at the same video and see something completely different, something that I missed. He understands these animals so well.”

There are now very few young people following in the path of Zepherin, who need to hunt from a young age in order to survive, who, because of that, spend decades learning every practical nuance of animal behaviour, who know the forest so well that they can spot the tiniest telltale element that is different, who can hear, distinguish, and identify the multifarious sounds of the forest. “It’s hard for me to imagine that you could become a great tracker if you didn’t start hunting from a very young age,” Bermejo says. “Ideally at age 8, maybe 10 or 12 at the latest.” That is a difficult life, no doubt.

The best confirmation of that, she tells me, is that the children of the hunters she has hired as trackers aren’t learning to hunt and don’t want to be trackers. That’s perhaps better for them. But that means a serious decline in collective wisdom: The deep knowledge of the forest, of the animals, of how to track them and interpret their behaviour that Zepherin possesses will be almost impossible to recover when all the people like him, with years of accumulated experience, are gone.

“I think in 30 years there will be no-one like Zepherin,” Bermejo says. “That will be a great loss. Because for me, I would never have been able to understand animals the way I do without someone like Zepherin.”