Upcountry Insight: Cross Border Conservation efforts the only way to save endangered Gorillas

NORTHERN PROVINCE The Virunga Massive which is the only remaining habitat of the threatened kingdom of mountain gorillas is still encroachment by human activities such as Agriculture, poaching, bamboo cutting for firewood as well as through the transmission of human related diseases to the animals. Having been gazetted in 1925, as Parc nationale Albert, the park was demarcated in the latter years after independence and this put the conservation efforts into the hands of respective authorities over different years. Whereas there have been cross-border meetings of the park wardens from Rwanda, Uganda and DR Congo which take place every quarter conservationists have pointed out that there is need to legalize trans-border patrols which would ensure the free movement of rangers across the borders to curb poaching through joint patrols. According to Prosper Uwingeri, the chief park warden of Virunga National Park, the cross border meetings are called to assess conservation efforts updates including enforcement of gorilla visitation rules, animal health threats, monitoring of illegal activities and exchange of ideas within the general context of conservation. Participants of the cross-border meeting noted that illegal park users like poachers of antelopes, buffalos and golden monkeys crossed the borders to hunt the animals and this made joint park patrols a more feasible solution. To curb such illegal activities ,there is need for instituting a camping patrol system where the park rangers ensure day and night patrols from Mgahinga National Park in Uganda, through to the Volcano National Park in Rwanda and extending this to Parc Nationale de Virunga within DR Congo. It was felt that a basic management tool for ecosystem surveillance, should be developed and implemented at regional level within the Virungas as this would maximize the presence of ranges, truckers and guides in these forest areas. In Uganda, a new program HUGO-program (human-gorillas) has been developed as a response to the problems linked to the presence of the gorillas out side the park and has been a big challenge among the residents. Park rangers observed that when animals moved out side the park, this increased the chances of live animal trafficking which has been common on the Congo side where the young mountain gorillas are being trafficked and sold in other countries. The Volcano National Park, which is a home to an estimated 260 mountain out of the remaining 380 gorillas (census carried out in 2003) in the virunga, requires a sustainable community involvement into the conservation campaign inn order to make it successful. Ends