Seven years after the dominant Mountain Gorilla in the Ruhija sector of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park died, Ndahura, the dominant silverback, has been immortalized in his original form.
Ndahura died in a freak accident in 2016. A tree branch he was sitting on broke, and he fell about 20 meters to his death.
He was 28 years old when he died. He was the leader of a group of 12 gorillas called the Bitukura Gorilla Group after the river that runs through the forest. He is known to have had four children.
The remains of Ndahura were stuffed and put on display in a glass case at the beginning of the Apes and Primate Exhibition on February 24 at the Uganda Museum in the country’s capital, Kampala. Visitors were amazed. At the exhibition, his skeleton is also on display.
Now, you can see Ndahura for the same price as $4US and maybe be inspired to save up the UGX 250,000 ($700US) needed to see gorillas in their natural habitat.
Even though he is only a fraction of the size he was when he was 420 pounds, Ndahura is now the only ambassador for this iconic endangered species. Their existence is threatened by climate change, which is caused by rising temperatures, droughts, C02 emissions, extreme weather, and human activities that may lead to the loss of habitat in their already small spaces.
According to Dr. Gladys Kalema Zikusooka, founder of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), a non-profit organization that runs programs to protect gorillas and other wildlife from human and livestock diseases, apes, primates, and other wildlife that are threatened by human wildlife conflict, poaching wars like the ones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), zoonotic diseases like COVID, human population growth rates, and climate change.
A 2018 census found that there were 1,063 gorillas in the world. This means that they are no longer “critically endangered” and have been moved to the “endangered” list on the CITES appendix as a result of increased conservation efforts in the last twenty years.
