In the early 1980s, mountain gorillas were heading toward extinction. There were perhaps 250 of them left. Poaching, habitat destruction, civil conflict, and disease were thinning a population that had nowhere left to go — confined to a handful of volcanic mountains straddling Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Today, there are more than 1,063.
That number comes from census surveys conducted across the two remaining mountain gorilla strongholds: the Virunga Massif (shared by Rwanda, Uganda, and DRC) and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. It is the highest count ever recorded. And it is rising.
The Only Growing Great Ape
Across the world, great apes are in trouble. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and western gorillas are all declining — squeezed by habitat loss, hunting, and disease. Mountain gorillas are the exception: the only great ape species in the world whose numbers are going up.
This is not an accident. It is the direct result of four decades of intensive, sustained, and often dangerous conservation work.
The transformation required governments to establish and defend protected areas across borders — a feat of diplomacy as much as conservation. It required rangers to patrol dangerous terrain in regions marked by conflict, often risking their lives to protect the animals. It required veterinary teams from organizations like the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project (now Gorilla Doctors) to treat sick and injured animals directly. And it required local communities to find economic reasons to support gorilla conservation rather than see it as an obstacle to their livelihoods — which ecotourism, centered on gorilla trekking, has provided.
From Critically Endangered to Endangered
The population milestone triggered a formal reclassification by the International Union for Conservation of Nature: mountain gorillas moved from "Critically Endangered" — the highest threat category — to "Endangered" on the IUCN Red List. It is a rare occasion when a species moves in that direction.
The word "Endangered" is not "safe." Mountain gorillas still face existential pressures: habitat encroachment, disease (they are vulnerable to human respiratory illnesses, a risk that became acute during COVID-19), and the ever-present threat of political instability in the region. With only 1,063 individuals split across a small geographic area, the margin for error remains vanishingly thin.
But the trajectory is clear. And in conservation, trajectory is everything.
What Works
The mountain gorilla story has become a model for what intensive, cross-border, community-integrated conservation can achieve. The key elements: political will, continuous monitoring, direct veterinary intervention, strict anti-poaching enforcement, and giving local people a genuine stake in the animals' survival.
None of it is cheap. None of it is easy. But it works.
In a world of conservation setbacks, the mountain gorilla is proof that the worst trajectory can be reversed — and that sometimes, against the odds, the numbers go up.
Sources: WWF Panda · International Gorilla Conservation Programme · IUCN Red List · Gorilla Doctors · Virunga National Park · Wildlife Conservation Society
