Ten years ago Lulingu was an 18-month-old orphan in the hands of wildlife traffickers. This week came confirmation that she is now a mother, living free in the mountains of eastern Congo.
Lulingu is a Grauer’s gorilla, also called an eastern lowland gorilla. She was confiscated by the Congolese wildlife authority, ICCN, and Gorilla Doctors, and raised at the GRACE sanctuary with a surrogate mother, Pinga. In December 2024 she was one of four females released on Mount Tshiaberimu in Virunga National Park.
On 21 May she gave birth. The father is Mwasa, a wild silverback. It is the first birth to a reintroduced Grauer’s gorilla in the park.
The baby and the mother are doing perfectly well. It really makes us happy.
It matters more than one baby might suggest. Grauer’s gorillas fell from about 16,900 in 1994 to an estimated 3,800 by 2015, and the small Tshiaberimu group was not expected to last 50 years without new females. Now it has a new generation.