KAHUZI-BIEGA NATIONAL PARK, Congo — Beneath a pair of extinct volcanic peaks in eastern Congo, on the edge of a verdant tropical rain forest, an enormous silverback gorilla named Chimenuka lounges on his back, two feet propped against a tree.
The burly animal shows little interest in a small team of machete-wielding Pygmy trackers, park rangers and armed guards who've come to check on him -- until they take one step too close.
In a second, the 400-pound gorilla springs upright, beating his chest, grunting and charging forward, forcing his visitors to cower before slipping away on all fours into thick underbrush.
Encounters like these once lured tourists to the misty highlands of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, where gorilla tourism was born in the 1970s. But a decade of turmoil, a 1998-2002 civil war and fresh fighting this summer have decimated the region's eastern lowland gorillas and driven tourists away.
Today, not even the experts really know how many gorillas are left. "It's tragic. Nobody has been able to conduct a full survey in a decade," said Innocent Liengola of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Most areas are too insecure to visit."
In late October, the New York-based organization resumed a head-counting operation in Kahuzi-Biega that was called off in April when Liengola and his colleagues were forced to flee amid volleys of automatic weapons fire -- a firefight, authorities said, between rebels from neighboring Rwanda and a local pro-government militia called the Mayi Mayi.
Eastern lowland gorillas, the tallest apes on Earth, live only in Congo and inhabit a broad band of forests from Lake Albert near the Ugandan border to the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika on the frontier with Burundi.
Conservationists say a deadly combination of poachers, refugees, miners and combat have devastated the gorillas' habitat and population, but they can only speculate by how much.
The Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International believes that the apes' numbers have plummeted 70% in the last decade -- to 5,000 from around 17,000 in 1994.
Patrick Melman, a Dian Fossey researcher in the eastern Congolese city of Goma, acknowledges that the figures are only an estimate, but says they are based on data available, including that from Kahuzi-Biega, where park rangers and researchers visit dozens of gorillas daily.
