One of the easiest ways to overcome the challenges of photographing forest wildlife is to wait for the animals to come to you. One place where this is possible is Mbeli Bai, in the south-west corner of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo. Bais are natural forest clearings that occur across many of the forests of the Congo Basin, and they act as magnets for wildlife, attracting species such as forest elephants and gorillas that come to feed and socialise in the clearings. Elephants are drawn by the salts and minerals that are contained deep in the soils of the clearings, and can often be seen plunging their trunks deep into the ground to reach them. Gorillas come to feed on the herbaceous vegetation in the clearings, and groups of gorillas can be observed for several hours at a time feeding on sedges and grasses in the clearings.
The photos in this post were mainly taken early one morning, when I spent around 24 hours at the clearing. I arrived at lunchtime on day one and installed my camera equipment on a wooden platform situated on the edge of the clearing, which is used by the researchers who study the animals that visit the site. I then spent the next few hours photographing a number of elephants that came into the clearing, as well as one or two sitatungas – forest antelope that have adapted to the swampy conditions in the bai.
After the photography was interrupted by a heavy rainstorm, I spent the night under a mosquito net at the clearing, so that I would be able to wake up at first light and capture images of animals in the clearing at dawn. As dawn broke just before 6am, there was an elephant feeding in the middle of the clearing, right in front of the platform, and he spent the next couple of hours eating his way through the vegetation.
Mbeli Bai is the focus of a long-running scientific study that has provided a unique insight into the behaviour and habits of the species that visit the clearing, especially Western Lowland Gorillas. Scientists have been working at Mbeli since 1995, and in that time they have observed over 400 gorillas, recording the social interactions within and between the different gorilla groups, and noting the births, deaths and other significant moments in the lives of the gorillas. In the process, those scientists have gained an unprecedented insight into their lives. Researchers have been able to compile a detailed picture of the life history – birth rates, mortality rates, inter-birth intervals, and more – of an intact gorilla population, and this insight can in turn provide vital information to the protected area managers that are responsible for protected those gorillas.
Of course, the protection of species such as western lowland gorillas is more important now than ever before. Although gorillas are protected by national laws throughout Central Africa, they suffer from many threats, most notably commercial hunting for bushmeat, loss of habitat, and diseases such as Ebola hemorrhagic fever. There is substantial evidence that these threats have caused an significant declines in some populations, leading to their reclassification by the IUCN as Critically Endangered. Information on the population dynamics and demography of western gorillas is needed to assess the vulnerability of populations to these threats, and to predict their ability to recover from decline in order to make decisions about effective conservation strategies. Apart from the work that has been done at Mbeli, very little is known about western gorillas in the wild, even though they account for more than 90 percent of all gorillas in the wild and nearly all captive populations.
