It’s almost a well-kept secret that the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is headquartered in Atlanta.
The nonprofit not only oversees gorilla conservation in Africa, but also oversees the Karisoke Research Center that Fossey founded in 1967 and which was immortalized in the movie Gorillas In The Mist. The Fossey fund landed here because of the prominence of Zoo Atlanta in the gorilla world – the zoo’s collection of 23 gorillas is the second-largest captive population in North America.
Last night, Dr. Katie Fawcett — the current director of Karisoke — spoke to a group of about 150 people at the Conservation Action Resource Center at Zoo Atlanta. “The more we know about the gorillas, the less we realize we know,” Fawcett said. “We’ve only seen one generation of gorillas. We’re still only answering basic questions, like the normal lifespan of a gorilla in the wild.”
Karisoke has often been a lightning rod of controversy in Rwanda. Fossey, of course, was murdered there in 1985, probably because of her campaign against poachers who were invading the gorillas’ habitat and killing the animals. Between 1990 and 1998, during a deadly civil war in Rwanda, the facility was evacuated five times and destroyed three times.
Today, Karisoke is located in a town at the foothills of the Virunga Mountains, which are divided between Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. It now has 84 staff members, many of whom go into the mountains to study gorillas in much the way Fossey did when she first founded Karisoke.
Although the civil war is settled in Rwanda, the Congo is being strangled by political strife that threatens gorillas in the Virunga National Park.
While the mountain gorilla population is estimated to be at 380 — more than when Fossey first when to Africa in 1967 — the animal is now listed as “critically endangered” and there is fear that human encroachment could wipe out gorillas in the wild in the next 20 years.
“The Congo is a disaster for gorillas at this moment,” Fawcett said, as she showed a slide of four gorilla corpses that brought gasps from the audience. She said 10 adult gorillas have been killed this year.
Clare Richardson, president of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, said the group is stepping up its efforts to protect the gorilla population in the Congo. “It’s a desperate situation,” she said. “The recent killings are a tragedy. The political situation is totally disrupting what we’re doing there.”
Richardson said the organization wants to increase its local presence and, for the first time, now has Atlantans on its board of trustees. “We’d like to stop being the best-kept secret in Atlanta,” she said.
(Photo courtesy Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International)
Two weekends from now, on Aug. 8 & 9, residents of Atlanta and Fulton County can visit Zoo Atlanta for free.
