Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda
Among Giants
Ninety minutes with one of the last mountain gorilla families on Earth.
“You trek for hours through dense undergrowth at altitude, and then the forest opens and there he is — six hundred pounds of silverback, ten feet away, entirely unimpressed.”
Volcanoes National Park
The dominant male
Mountain gorillas live in family groups led by a silverback — the dominant adult male whose gray-white saddle of fur signals maturity and authority. This silverback stood against a tree at the edge of a clearing, surveying the group with an economy of movement that made his size difficult to process.
Shot at 250mm on the Nikon Z50. The forest light at altitude — filtered through a canopy at 2,500 metres — has a quality that renders fur texture differently than anything in the open savanna. ISO 1100 at f/6.3 to hold the depth across his full frame.
The Family Group
Only about 1,000 remain
Mountain gorillas are found only in the Virunga volcanic mountains straddling Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC, and in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Their numbers have recovered significantly through conservation efforts — from a low of around 620 in the 1980s to approximately 1,000 today. Each individual is known by name to the researchers who monitor them daily.
The infant peering from behind its mother (left) was estimated to be around eight months old. Gorilla infants cling to their mothers for the first few years of life, dependent on her for warmth, transport, and the social cues that will govern the rest of their lives in the group. The adult at rest (right) had found a patch of undergrowth dense enough to nest in briefly — the forest floor doing what a bed does, for an animal that requires no ceiling.
Own the Work
Wildlife prints available
Rwanda and Africa wildlife photographs available as museum-quality fine art prints.